Summary
A shutterbug patriarch, John Carr, converts his creaking Victorian manse into a living camera obscura: every corridor becomes a bellows, every family secret a ghost-image slowly burning onto the celluloid of memory. Rosemary Carr, the elder daughter, stages stiff tableaux of domestic bliss while surreptitiously exposing the cracks; Myra Brooks, the orphaned cousin, drifts through parlors like an overexposed negative, half-real, desperate to belong; Clarence McGinty, the fiancé-cum-insurance adjuster, tallies damages no policy can cover—fractured trust, embezzled affections, a crime-scene heart. Stephen Carr, the war-haunted brother, smuggles home a crate of undeveloped trench negatives that begin to devour the household, each frame unfurling a trench-foot stench of guilt. Lynn Hammond, the itinerant portraitist, arrives peddling instant permanence, yet leaves with every likeness smeared. Hilda Darron, the governess who once posed for pornographic stereoscopes, now teaches the children how to disappear inside their own silhouettes. Together they inhabit a dwelling that is less a home than a darkroom aglow with safelight tensions: every click of the shutter a dare, every chemical bath a baptism into new deceit. When the family discovers a cache of forged photographs implying incest, forgery, and murder, the residence itself seems to develop the images: wallpaper peels into curling negatives, chandeliers drip silver nitrate tears, and the grand staircase melts into a spiral of celluloid ribbon. By the time the final portrait is hung, identity has become a double exposure—no one is sure which layer belongs to whom, only that the fixative smells disturbingly of blood.
Synopsis
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