Spiritus Ex Machina collects five tales of science, technology, and creation from author LC von Hessen in a mélange of gothic horror, weird fiction, speculative fiction, and dark fantasy. By turns visceral and ambiguous, unsettling and darkly comic, these stories follow artists, performers, doctors, scholars, engineers, and occultists alongside hapless folk who find themselves caught up in the incomprehensible. From 18th-century salon to contemporary suburban home, from fairy tale to thesis paper, from carnival to mortuary to secret society hidden beneath a factory, peer into the Great Unknown through the eyepiece of a sideshow attraction or the eyes of an automaton.