Kaleidotrope, January 2026
Introduction
Emily Linstrom’s “Confessions of the Little Seer” (published in a literary magazine context) represents a sophisticated meditation on embodiment, deception, and moral reckoning through the vehicle of Gothic Americana. As a writer whose work has appeared in genre-focused publications including the feminist horror magazine Suspira and Last Girls Club, Linstrom demonstrates her investment in amplifying marginalized voices through speculative frameworks. This story exemplifies what might be termed “confessional Gothic”—a subgenre that merges the intimacy of first-person testimony with the supernatural apparatus of ghost fiction to explore questions of ethical accountability and social alienation. The text’s central achievement lies in its complex interrogation of authenticity, marginalization, and redemption, employing the figure of the fraudulent medium-turned-genuine seer to destabilize binary distinctions between performance and truth, exploitation and service, isolation and community.
Plot and Context
Set primarily in the Florida Keys during an unspecified period of American modernity (post-Gilded Age but pre-Disney commercialization), the narrative charts the life trajectory of an unnamed dwarf woman who builds a lucrative career as a spiritualist medium in New England before being publicly exposed as a charlatan. Following her disgrace, she relocates to southern Florida, seeking geographical and spiritual sanctuary from her past deceptions. The story’s central irony emerges when genuine ghosts—those she once falsely claimed to channel—begin appearing to her, demanding she transcribe their undelivered messages to the living. Through a series of spectral visitations, including a conquistador who becomes her unlikely companion, the protagonist transitions from fraudulent medium to authentic scribe, ultimately sending her transcribed confessions to the newspaper that once denounced her.
The narrative is structured through a fragmented chronology, with two marked interludes that retrospectively illuminate the protagonist’s childhood formation and adolescent experience of being “little.” These temporal disruptions serve both structural and thematic functions, mirroring the protagonist’s own sense of dislocation while allowing Linstrom to explore how identity is constructed across time.
Critical Analysis
Theme and Meaning
Linstrom’s text operates on multiple thematic registers simultaneously. Most prominently, the story interrogates the relationship between performance and authenticity, suggesting that the boundaries between genuine and fraudulent experience are far more porous than moralistic binaries allow. The protagonist’s mother offers the story’s ethical framework early: the tarot cards “mean whatever I want them to,” yet they fulfill genuine material and emotional needs. This gray epistemology—“my first and only lesson in the grey art of trickery”—establishes a moral universe where intention, consequence, and truth exist in productive tension rather than opposition.
The ghosts themselves embody this ambiguity. When the Gibson Girl reveals what she “would never say”—offering sexually explicit marital advice rather than the saccharine platitudes the protagonist invented—Linstrom suggests that authentic communication between living and dead might involve precisely the vulgar, uncomfortable truths that Victorian spiritualism euphemized away. The protagonist’s fraudulent séances, despite their commercial motivation, may have served a legitimate therapeutic function for the bereaved, even as they misrepresented the deceased.
The story’s treatment of embodiment and social marginalization represents its most sustained thematic concern. Linstrom refuses to sentimentalize dwarfism while also rejecting ableist narratives that position physical difference as metaphorical shortcoming. The protagonist’s restricted growth functions simultaneously as literal fact, social stigma, and marketable commodity—she is “cursed in stature but blessed with a most divine talent.” The text meticulously documents the material consequences of being “little”: the specially designed furniture, the infantilization, the strategic marketing of her body as “a kind of household faerie.” Yet the protagonist maintains analytical distance from these experiences, her sardonic narration refusing victimhood even while cataloging genuine harm.
The Florida setting operates as more than mere backdrop. Linstrom positions the Keys as liminal space—geographically peripheral, culturally transitional, historically layered. The protagonist’s assumption that “ghosts, after all, are Gothic concoctions” unsuited to saturated southern landscapes proves precisely wrong; Los Martires (“the Martyrs”) hosts its own history of violence and unfinished business. The conquistador’s presence reminds readers that American soil contains European colonial ghosts, that no geography escapes history’s hauntings.
Form and Style
Linstrom employs a sophisticated first-person retrospective narration that maintains consistent tonal control while allowing for considerable emotional range. The prose style balances period-appropriate diction with contemporary accessibility, avoiding both antiquarian pastiche and anachronistic colloquialism. The narrator’s voice—ironic, self-aware, occasionally bitter but never self-pitying—proves the story’s greatest asset. Sentences like “I had been disassembled and reduced to my singular parts, each acting in rebellion against its sum” demonstrate Linstrom’s capacity for metaphorical precision.
The narrative’s two marked interludes disrupt chronological progression, demanding active readerly participation in assembling the protagonist’s history. This fragmentation mirrors the protagonist’s own experience of temporal dislocation—exiled from her past life, suspended in Florida’s eternal present, visited by ghosts for whom “time passed sideways.” The structural choice also allows Linstrom to control information revelation, delaying the childhood tarot scene and adolescent isolation until they gain maximum thematic resonance.
The story’s opening with the 1819 Venetian elephant incident exemplifies Linstrom’s method throughout: historical anecdote deployed as emotional and thematic analogue. The image of the cornered elephant building a pew barricade before its violent death establishes the text’s central concern with “the audacity of cornered creatures” facing impossible odds. This technique recurs—references to Charon, Barnum, Gibson Girls, conquistadors—creating an intertextual web that situates the protagonist within larger histories of spectacle, exploitation, and survival.
Linstrom’s imagery tends toward the domestic and material rather than the ethereal. Ghosts don’t manifest as ectoplasmic mist but appear “where the sunlight sliced through the shutter louvres,” speak with gramophone voices “clear enough but inorganic and frequently interspersed with static.” The protagonist’s fraudulent tools—cheesecloth, bottled scents sewn into crinolines—receive loving attention to texture and practicality. This grounded approach to the supernatural serves the story’s interest in collapsing false binaries; ghosts are no more or less material than living bodies, séances no more or less theatrical than everyday social performance.
The text’s treatment of language deserves particular attention. The conquistador and protagonist communicate despite linguistic barriers, accessing what she describes as a frequency “unreachable but not inaccessible if the ear is trained.” This mystical communication coexists with the story’s investment in precise transcription—the protagonist becomes secretary to the dead, recording their messages verbatim. Language operates simultaneously as barrier, bridge, performance, and documentary truth.
Characterization
The unnamed protagonist represents Linstrom’s most significant achievement. She is neither victim nor villain but a fully realized consciousness navigating systemic marginalization through available means—deception, commodity self-presentation, strategic isolation. Her fraudulent career emerges from her mother’s pragmatic ethics and her father’s intellectual resources (the apothecary company’s miracle cures, the extensive library), suggesting that the protagonist’s charlatanism represents less moral failing than family inheritance.
The protagonist’s relationship to her own body proves complex and non-didactic. She experiences genuine suffering from adolescent medical interventions (the “braces the doctor insisted would stretch my limbs” that “made me sound like the Tin Man”) and social infantilization, yet she also strategically deploys her size as marketing asset. She refuses both to transcend her embodiment through spiritual metaphor and to reduce herself to it; her dwarfism is fact, not symbol.
The ghosts function as characterological chorus, each briefly sketched but distinct—the Gibson Girl’s sexual frankness, Mr. Beardham’s matter-of-fact disclosure of supernatural bureaucracy, the various complainers and confessors. The conquistador, however, receives fuller development. His inability to recognize his own death, his “too young and eager” quality, his patient listening and practical suggestion that she write it all down—these details construct him as the protagonist’s genuine companion despite (or because of) their shared liminality.
The story’s treatment of the protagonist’s parents in the interludes reveals Linstrom’s skill with economical characterization. The mother’s laugh “sounded like crows flying out of her mouth,” her pragmatic deceptions and vanity, establishes her as the protagonist’s ethical progenitor. The father’s transformation into apothecary partner “around this time” leaves “a bruise on my heart” for the protagonist, who wonders if he sought “a bottled cure for the daughter who never required it in the first place.” These few details construct an entire family psychology of well-meaning harm.
Historical and Cultural Context
“Confessions of the Little Seer” engages multiple historical contexts: Gilded Age spiritualism, nineteenth-century medical approaches to dwarfism, American commercial spectacle, and Florida’s layered colonial history. Linstrom demonstrates facility with spiritualist culture—the séances, ectoplasm, the bereaved seeking contact with dead loved ones—while maintaining critical distance from its class dimensions (the “Grand Tour snobs” attracted to Italian catchphrases).
The text participates in what might be termed disability studies approaches to Gothic fiction, examining how bodies marked as different become simultaneously spectacularized and erased. The protagonist’s experience—“kept out of sight as much as possible” after her restricted growth became undeniable, yet earlier a public child in her community—demonstrates the contradiction of hypervisibility and social invisibility that characterizes marginalized embodiment.
The story also engages American studies concerns with regional identity and historical memory. Florida appears as palimpsest, the conquistador’s ghost reminding readers that American landscapes contain multiple temporal strata. The protagonist’s assumption that Gothic ghosts belong to “Pagan continents” with “centuries-old secrets” reveals her own cultural provinciality; the Americas possess their own ancient violences.
From a feminist critical perspective, the text interrogates gender alongside ability. The protagonist’s mother engages in gendered deception (hiding purchases from her husband, performing fortune-telling for “hysterical housewives”), while the protagonist herself enters what appears to be sex work before “swerv[ing] instead into the world of teatime spiritualism”—a distinction the text leaves deliberately ambiguous. Her career as medium represents one of few options for Victorian women to achieve economic independence and public presence.
Evaluation
“Confessions of the Little Seer” succeeds remarkably in its ambitious thematic program while maintaining narrative propulsion and emotional resonance. Linstrom’s prose style proves consistently strong, capable of period evocation without affectation and tonal range without sentimentality. The story’s central conceit—fraudulent medium becomes genuine scribe—risks obviousness, but Linstrom complicates it sufficiently to avoid moral didacticism.
The text’s greatest strength lies in its refusal of easy redemption narratives. The protagonist doesn’t transform from bad person to good person; she remains the same sardonic, pragmatic consciousness, merely performing different functions. Her final act of mailing the transcribed messages represents not moral conversion but practical problem-solving—a way to “amend the matter” and be rid of her ghostly visitors. Even the conquistador friendship, potentially sentimental, maintains ambiguity: “who was I to say where and how kindred spirits should meet?” The phrasing suggests genuine connection while acknowledging its fundamental strangeness.
The story’s treatment of embodiment represents particularly significant literary achievement. Linstrom avoids both inspirational narratives of overcoming disability and reductive symbolism that positions the protagonist’s dwarfism as mere metaphor for emotional or spiritual diminishment. The body remains stubbornly literal throughout—requiring specially designed furniture, attracting unwanted attention, marketable in specific ways—while also existing as the site from which consciousness, irony, and ethical reasoning emerge.
Weaknesses prove relatively minor. The two interludes, while thematically rich, slightly disrupt narrative momentum. Some readers may find the central irony—that ghosts appear only after the protagonist abandons her fraudulent practice—overly neat, though Linstrom’s self-aware narration arguably anticipates and deflects this criticism. The story’s ending, with the protagonist waiting for the conquistador with rum and her folded ectoplasm, achieves appropriate open-endedness but may leave some readers desiring greater closure.
The text’s originality lies less in its individual elements—spiritualist fraud narratives, disability coming-of-age stories, Gulf South Gothic—than in their synthesis and the sophistication of their execution. Linstrom demonstrates how genre frameworks (ghost story, confession, historical fiction) can accommodate serious investigation of embodiment, ethics, and social marginalization without sacrificing narrative pleasure.
Conclusion
Emily Linstrom’s “Confessions of the Little Seer” represents a significant contribution to contemporary Gothic fiction, demonstrating how supernatural apparatus can illuminate questions of authenticity, embodiment, and moral reckoning. The story’s central achievement lies in its complex, non-judgmental exploration of fraud and truth, suggesting that the relationship between performance and authenticity proves far more nuanced than conventional moralism allows. Through its unnamed protagonist—dwarf, charlatan, genuine medium, and finally scribe—the text interrogates how marginalized bodies navigate systems of exploitation and spectacle, finding agency through strategic self-presentation even as they suffer real harm.
The story’s formal sophistication—its controlled first-person narration, strategic temporal fragmentation, and precise period evocation—serves its thematic concerns effectively. Linstrom’s prose demonstrates range and precision, capable of sardonic humor, historical documentation, and genuine pathos without tonal confusion. Her treatment of dwarfism represents particularly significant literary achievement, refusing both sentimental elevation and symbolic reduction in favor of complex material realism.
As contemporary Gothic fiction increasingly engages questions of embodiment, disability, and historical reckoning, “Confessions of the Little Seer” offers a model for how genre conventions can accommodate serious investigation without sacrificing narrative pleasure. The text’s investment in “the audacity of cornered creatures” facing impossible odds speaks to enduring questions about how individuals marked as different negotiate systems designed for their erasure. Future scholarship might productively examine this story alongside other disability Gothic narratives, or situate it within larger studies of American spiritualism’s relationship to gender, class, and embodiment.
Linstrom’s achievement lies in creating a protagonist who refuses victimhood without denying harm, who remains ethically complex without becoming morally incoherent, and who ultimately finds redemption not through transformation but through the more difficult work of making amends for actual wrongs. In an era of simplified moral narratives, “Confessions of the Little Seer” offers the more challenging pleasure of genuine ethical complexity.