Seance Infernale

An extraordinary debut—part thriller, part mystery, part historical novel—that follows a movie memorabilia dealer as he searches for what could be the first film ever made, Séance Infernale.

Los Angeles, 2002. Alex Whitman is hired by an enigmatic collector to locate a copy of Séance Infernale. The film's creator, Augustin Sekuler, is considered by those in the know to be the true inventor of motion pictures (not the Lumière brothers or Thomas Edison). In 1890, Sekular had boarded a Paris-bound train from Dijon, days before he was to present to the world his greatest new invention—a moving picture machine. But Sekuler never arrived at Gare de Lyon. He and his moving picture machine vanished, never to be heard from again. When Alex Whitman tracks down what might be fragments of Sekuler's famously lost film, questions are raised—about Sekuler, about what happened to him and his invention, and about the film itself. And the stakes become ratcheted up as the film's riddles lead to a darker, far more dangerous mystery.