Beware the Afterword to a novella—if you must explain your intent, you’re doomed. Yet, still, doomed though I may be, I must. The Necromancer is part of a cycle of stories and novels about Harrow and those who took part in its haunting. Harrow is a manse that sits upon a shadowed property of the Hudson Valley of New York. The novels of Harrow, so far, are Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite, and The Abandoned. The Necromancer is a tale of the creator of Harrow, Justin Gravesend, and is simply the beginning of his life as he moves toward the darkness that brings him to create the evil house with the potential for the greatest number of hauntings and occult phenomena.
Each of the Harrow tales is based simply on my idea of capturing the essence of a certain literary love of mine within the crucible of a magical place—in this case, Harrow. With Nightmare House, it was the quiet ghost story that drew me to it; with Mischief, the coming-of-age tale; with The Infinite, the psychic investigation of a haunted place; and with The Abandoned, the all-out violence and mayhem and shocking moments, as if apocalypse has been unleashed.
With The Necromancer, the tale is of the debauched Victorian Englishman—or Welshman, in Justin’s particular case—who embarks on a dark journey into madness and the deep end of the occult.
Each Harrow novel is as different from the one before as it is from the one after—I hope you’ll enjoy exploring this gothic cathedral of a haunted world in the other Harrow novels.
—Douglas Clegg, October 2005