Book Review: The Spirit Engineer, by AJ West

I stared across the room as a shape emerged from the darkness. A figure, its head covered by a long, black shroud. Slowly, a set of pale fingers appeared from beneath the table, pulling away the material to reveal a crown of dark hair, parted at the scalp as if scratched into the air with chalk. It was the girl from the window. Her eyes sparkled in the flicker of the lamp, hands rested on the arms of her chair. She cocked her head with a curious smile.

“Hello, Professor,” she said. “You have come at last; we have been waiting for you.”

“The Spirit Engineer”, by AJ West

The story:

William Jackson Crawford is a man of science and a professor of engineering at the Belfast Municipal Technical Institute. So when he discovers his wife is attending spiritualist seances led by medium Kathleen Goligher and her family, he is appalled and determined to put a stop to her visits. But when he himself is witness to things he can’t explain, he is forced to consider — is this an elaborate hoax to fool the bereaved, or could he be the first scientist to conclusively prove the existence of the afterlife?

My thoughts:

“The Spirit Engineer” by AJ West is a work of fiction, but I was fascinated to learn that the people it depicts did in fact exist, and the real William Jackson Crawford was a renowned, although now mostly forgotten, researcher in spiritual phenomenon, known to the famous spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle himself.

The story begins in Belfast in 1914, with the city still in shock from the loss of the Titanic 2 years before. Many families had lost someone aboard, including the Crawford family, with William’s brother-in-law Arthur. To follow this tragedy, the Crawfords also lose their young son Robert to illness.

Tortured by his own guilt over the death of his wife’s brother and his own son, Crawford is both scientifically repulsed and emotionally drawn to the mysteries of spiritualism, and the possibility of communication with his lost family members. And as a struggling professor, he finds it impossible to resist when he is offered a substantial sum of money to scientifically investigate medium Kathleen Goligher and her family.

Of course, we can’t know what actually happened to Crawford, but his path from engineer, to spiritualist investigator, to death by suicide is factual, and the author does a great job of taking the bones of this story and imagining what could have driven a man of science down the spiritualist path — a path of course that many respected and educated people trod in the early part of the twentieth century (with the First World War no doubt a strong influence on this).

We know from the book’s prologue of William’s ultimate fate, but the conclusion itself still remains shocking, with the author completely pulling the rug from under you. Overall, an enjoyable dark read for fans of gothic historical fiction!

Pages: 304
Published: 7th October 2021
Rating: 🐈🐈🐈.5/5