The Peculiarities

London, 1899. Thomas Thresher is forced by his elder brother Walter to abandon an idle life and work as a junior clerk in the family bank, where he discovers irregular purchases of debts and properties. At the same time, his childhood friend dies mysteriously and leaves begin sprouting from Thomas’s skin, one manifestation of the unnatural transformations and predatory fogs collectively dismissed by respectable society as the Peculiarities.

Thomas and his intended bride, Esther Feldstein, follow the bank’s transactions into London’s occult networks and secret societies, encountering figures including Aleister Crowley, W. B. Yeats, Bram Stoker and Arthur Conan Doyle. The historical fantasy combines late-Victorian finance, antisemitism, spiritualism and ceremonial magic, using Thomas’s physical transformation and the bank’s hidden scheme to question who controls property, bodies and social respectability.