Black Flame

Ellen Kramer spends her working life caring for other people's images while keeping much of herself concealed. A film archivist in 1980s New York, she is drawn into the restoration of The Baroness, a notorious movie long believed lost in a Nazi fire. The surviving footage promises an extraordinary discovery. It also exerts an increasingly intimate hold over the woman trying to recover it. As Ellen's fascination deepens, the boundary between scholarly attention and dangerous obsession begins to collapse. Her closeted desires and the film's disturbing power become impossible to disentangle. This horror novel uses the recovery of a forbidden artwork to explore repression, longing and the terrible cost of looking.