STORIES

The inspiration for the Seeling Night stories come from an imaginatively fertile period working at Holmes Book Company in Oakland’s Lakeside Apartments district. The cavernous, eighty year old Holmes building had a soon-to-be validated reputation for paranormal activity.  Poltergeist phenomena, apparitions, and whispering voices became something to accommodate into the experience of running a bookstore in an economically depressed area. 

A chance discovery of Arthur Machen’s The Three Impostors in a discard bin lead Lemuel away from science fiction and into the wide field of  terror and suspense. The Great God Pan followed, and that conflation of suspense fiction with supernatural themes influenced the Seeling Night stories, as did the work of M.R. James, William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells. 

The Seeling Night stories have a particular composition. They are based on actual events, either from the author’s own experience or from case histories, rather than fantastic plots with comic book trappings. The setting is the once rough neighborhood that starts at Second and Alice Street and ends at the Maritime Service Building in Oakland. 

The central character in all of the Seeling Night stories is Cabal, an antiquarian bookseller and collector.

Fierce, lofty, and private, with a keen wit and sulphuric temperament, he is not an entirely sympathetic character, and only incidentally heroic, but his rough qualities make him compelling as he navigates an antiquarian world of ghosts, and demons.