The Dissection of Ian Mowbray

The Dissection of Ian Mowbray follows Dr. Ian Mowbray, a brilliant but increasingly obsessive anatomist working beneath the smoke-choked streets of New Edinburgh in 1888.When his eight-year-old daughter, Liana, is diagnosed with terminal consumption, Ian refuses to accept that medicine has failed her. Certain that death itself is merely another biological problem waiting to be solved, he begins conducting illegal dissections on the dead.Then he discovers something impossible.Hidden along the nervous system of every human body is a strange crystalline structure-a physical remnant of consciousness that Ian names the animus-crystal.Ghosts, he realizes, may not be spirits in the traditional sense. They may be the lingering consciousness encoded within these mysterious structures.And Ian discovers something even more extraordinary.The crystals can heal damaged living tissue.Desperate to save Liana, he begins harvesting them.But every gift has a price.As fragments of the dead are implanted into Liana, she begins displaying memories, fears, languages, and personalities that do not belong to her. Ian's medical breakthrough slowly becomes an ethical nightmare.His assistant Erick eventually discovers the truth: Ian's experiments have transformed human beings into specimens and their souls into inventory.Then Ian makes his final decision.There is only one complete soul compatible enough to save his daughter permanently.His own.What follows is a catastrophic confrontation in the hidden anatomy vault beneath St. Sebastian's Hospital, where hundreds of harvested souls return to witness what Ian has done.They do not come for revenge.They come to make him remember.And what Ian discovers in the presence of the dead will force him to confront the one truth his science can never measure: The soul is not an organ.