…about translation, failure and the unsettling company of the great dead. D. Scott Calhoun sends a timid professor of French to a mountain castle for struggling artists, where the ghosts of Borel, Nerval and Baudelaire are waiting to argue with him, and to teach him that fidelity is not the same thing as courage. Sylvan is a wonderful narrator, and La Casa Sombría and its inhabitants are among the most vivid we have met in a manuscript this year. Recommended for readers who like their literary fiction strange, bookish and alive, and for anyone who has ever wanted to argue with a dead poet and lose.”

—WroteaBook.org