The Beckoning Hand, and Other Stories

A theatre fire, a mysterious woman, and a man powerless to look away. This collection of late Victorian tales opens with Harry Tristram's fateful encounter with Césarine Vivian, a woman whose allure carries something darker beneath its surface. When flames consume the playhouse, Harry helps her escape into the night, and from that moment he is ensnared in her orbit. The stories that follow delve into the shadowy territory between attraction and danger, where relationships curdle into obsession and the supernatural bleeds into the ordinary. Allen, an early master of the sensation novel, populates these pages with characters drawn toward forbidden knowledge, hidden pasts, and women who remain forever just out of reach. The writing carries the breathless quality of Victorian melodrama, with all its delicious excesses and moral ambiguities intact. For readers who crave the gothic thrills of Wilkie Collins or the psychological tension of Henry James at his most sinister.