Search Worlds Without End

A rationalist Victorian visits a haunted house in order to explain the nature of its ghostly inhabitants.

This novelette originally appeared in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, August 1859. It has been anthologized many times. It was the basis for the 1948 movie Night Comes Too Soon (The Ghost of Rashmon Hall).

A new novel that explores the way your past--and your family--can haunt you like nothing else...

When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn't want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn't want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father's academic career and her mother's lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn't want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world.

Most of all, she doesn't want to deal with her brother, Mark, who never left their hometown, gets fired from one job after another, and resents her success. Unfortunately, she'll need his help to get the house ready for sale because it'll take more than some new paint on the walls and clearing out a lifetime of memories to get this place on the market.

But some houses don't want to be sold, and their home has other plans for both of them...

The stories found in A Haunted House reflect Virginia Woolf's experimental writing style and act as an enlightening introduction to the longer fiction of this pioneer novelist. Gathering works from the previously published Monday or Tuesday, as well as stories published in American and British magazines, this book compiles some of the best shorter fiction of one of the most important writers of our time.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword - essay by Leonard Woolf
• A Haunted House - (1921)
• Monday or Tuesday - (1921)
• A Unwritten Novel
• The String Quartet
• Kew Gardens
• The Mark on the Wall
• The New Dress - (1927)
• The Shooting Party
• Lappin and Lapinova - (1965)
• Solid Objects - (1920)
• The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection - (1929)
• The Duchess and the Jeweller
• Moments of Being
• The Man Who Loved His Kind
• The Searchlight
• The Legacy
• Together and Apart
• A Summing Up

Susan Backstrom seems to have a charmed life-but she also has dangerous family secrets. When she hears some kids talking about exploring a nearby haunted house, Susan asks to join them, even though she knows what might happen if she gets caught. The teenagers discover that there is indeed a ghost, and the house itself is a living, supernatural thing. With the help of five new friends-three humans, one ghost, and House-Susan has what she needs to build a new life, if she dares.

Matt (Matilda) Black possesses the unique ability to speak with inanimate objects and witness the dreams of other people. She spends her days traveling from place to place alone -- yet never lonely, for she can communicate with all that surrounds her.

She finds a kindred spirit in Edmund Reynolds -- a wandering witch on a spiritual quest to help those in need. But once Matt learns that Edmund has never come to terms with his abrupt departure from his hometown, she convinces him to return.

Together, these two special people will embark on an odyssey of the imagination. They will encounter things both wonderful and terrifying. And after so many years of solitude they will learn to depend on one another -- as they look into the darkest depths of the past...

The Nebula and World Fantasy Award-nominated author of A Red Heart of Memories continues the spellbinding story of the wandering witch Matilda (Matt) Black, who possesses the ability to communicate with inanimate objects and see into people's dreams--and her companion Edmund Reynolds, a young man with magic of his own who is only beginning to come to grips with his past and his powers...

The two travelers have come to the town where Edmund grew up, and found shelter in the benevolently haunted house that was a refuge for Edmund and his friends when they were children. But the house begins to speak to Matt, urgently, telling her that she and Edmund have to leave, to seek out the long-scattered friends. For a darkness is rising, a dangerous, powerful entity. And the only chance of stopping it lies in the hearts of the lost children of the house...