Forbidden Planet New York City hosts author Clay McLeod Chapman on Wednesday, June 4, 2025, from 5 – 7 PM for a book signing and release party celebrating the release of the trade paperback edition of his graphic novel Séance in the Asylum.

About Séance in the Asylum:

1865. The Civil War finally reaches its grueling end. Soldiers returning from the frontline come home broken, their minds shattered. An influx of patients overwhelms The Ashcroft Hospital, an asylum in upstate New York. Dr. John James Templeton is busy developing a radical new theory: spiritualism—the act of communicating with the dead—is its own form of therapy. What better way to draw out these mental maladies then with a little assistance from the other side? Templeton enlists Alicia Wilkinson, a medium who as a young girl established herself as a sought-after conduit capable of contacting the dead…but her own past continues to haunt her.

These séance sessions become a cutting-edge form of “spectral therapy,” where patients are permitted to converse with, perhaps expunge, their own maladies. By reaching out beyond the veil of our own world, these spirits aid in drawing out the illness of the patient. But something is changing in the patients. They are acting different… possessed, perhaps. Templeton’s experiment is a success. Too successful. It is up to Alicia to understand what is happening to the patients of Ashcroft – before it’s too late.