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If you’re looking for an excellent scare, I highly recommend The Silent Companions. It’s an insidiously creepy Victorian Gothic tale, as well as great historical fiction. If you’re into stories about witchcraft, you’ll also appreciate this one. It’s got a little bit of everything, for everyone. This novel has officially made it onto my list of recommended scaryAF stories. When newly widowed Elsie is sent to see out her pregnancy at her late husband's crumbling country estate, The Bridge, what greets her is far from the life of wealth and privilege she was expecting . . . This is a deeply unsettling, wonderfully atmospheric and truly creepy novel. We first meet Elsie Bainbridge as a patient in an asylum, where she is suspected of murder. The progressive Dr Shepherd encourages her to write down her story, as she is refusing, or unable, to speak. What emerges is her recounting how she married Rupert Bainbridge, largely to help save her brother’s match factory. However, although the marriage was one of convenience, Elsie found herself surprisingly happy to be the wife of her new husband. Sadly, though, she shortly finds herself both pregnant and widowed; sent by her brother to stay at her husband’s country house, The Bridge.
This was an excellent choice for a Traveling Sister Read! I enjoyed reading this along with my “sisters” Brenda, Norma, Diane S, Dana and Holly B. They helped me get through the frighteningly creepy parts, although I still may have to sleep with the lights on for a while. Doretha "Dotty" Truelove (let's, for a minute, admire her last name!), is a young woman from a "good home" Her mother died when she was young, and she has been raised by her father. "Dotty" is a smart and inquisitive young woman who wants more out of life than just being a married woman. She is interested in phrenology and believes it can shed a light on one's crimes. She does charitable work at Oakgate prison and there she meets a sixteen-year-old accused of murder named Ruth Butterham (what a last name!). Ruth believes that she has a supernatural power and can/has killed people using her skills as a seamstress. Is she a skilled killer or is she a skilled seamstress? Is she both? Unsettled and lonely, Elsie begins to hear noises at night. Exploring with Sarah, the pair uncover some strange wooden Dutch ‘companions,’ which are lifelike, cut out paintings. Initially Elsie thinks they are interesting and unusual, but soon the companions seem to have a life of their own… Along with the companions, Sarah uncovers a diary from Anne Bainbridge, her ancestor, written two hundred years before. Anne, and her husband, Josiah, are thrilled that Charles I and his wife, Henrietta Maria, are to visit their house. However, Josiah is keen that their mute daughter, Hetta, is kept away from the royal visitors. Tragedies also seem to follow the house throughout the years, leaving a sense of deep disquiet and unease among the locals. In the above passage, Melville describes a felt presence on waking from sleep. A range of unusual experiences occur in the no-man’s land between sleep and waking, usually including short bursts of speech or visions in the transition to sleep (hypnagogic hallucinations) or fragments from dreams on awakening (hypnopompic hallucinations) (Jones et al., 2009). Felt presences in particular are a common feature of sleep paralysis. This is a phenomenon that will occur to one third of the population at some point in their lives (Cheyne & Girard, 2007; see also tinyurl.com/jscf0809), in which the awakening from sleep is accompanied by muscle paralysis and breathing problems. During paralysis many people describe the intense feeling of someone or something being in the room, often with a distinct location, occasionally moving towards them, in some cases pushing down on the person’s chest, and provoking a strong sense of dread. Folk accounts of visits by demon-like nightmares, incubi and succubi are thought to derive from such sleep paralysis experiences (Adler, 2011). The TPJ is a multimodal area that is both anatomically and functionally diverse, so clear overlaps between voice and presence experiences are yet to be established. Nevertheless, for such phenomenologically unusual experiences, any clues that may shed light on overlapping or similar cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms are important to consider. And feelings of presence arguably provide a wealth of such clues: understanding the Third Man provides a model for how one’s own body could create the feeling of another; explanations of sleep paralysis highlight the role of negative affect and threat in driving unusual experiences; while the presences that follow bereavement provide examples of how identity without form can persist over time. Taken together, accounts of presence show us the ‘others’ that we carry with us at all times, the silent companions whose visits can either guide or haunt; support or confuse, comfort or terrify.What an eerie story! Be aware that if you have a fear of wooden dolls with eyes that follow you when you move around, this is probably not a book for you (or maybe it’s exactly the book for you, then!) :-) All these different elements combine to make an eerie story where everything creeps along, I thought it might have been too slow but honestly it was perfect to build up this feeling of dread. The story is primarily about Elsie Bainbridge in 1865, pregnant and newly widowed, who moves into the house her late husband was in the midst of renovating when he died. The house has baggage; it spooks the locals and is rumored to have bodies buried in the yard. Shortly after moving in, Elsie and her cousin-in-law are feeling spooked too.
Unusual feelings of presence have always been associated with similarly unusual or unorthodox interpretations. Some presence experiences appear to share qualities with the feeling (and subsequent discovery) of being stared at; a phenomenon argued to be a real faculty of perception by some (Sheldrake, 2005), but without any strong empirical basis (e.g. Colwell et al., 2000). Persinger and colleagues (e.g. Booth et al., 2005) have argued that felt presences can occur as a result of changes to the earth’s magnetic field, although such effects seem likely to arise from participant suggestibility (Granqvist et al., 2005). Finally, some psychotherapists and spiritual healers consider presences to be evidence of an entity that must be persuaded to depart its host; a controversial approach known as ‘spirit release’ therapy (Powell, 2006). With her new servants resentful and the local villagers actively hostile, Elsie only has her husband's awkward cousin for company. Or so she thinks. What research on felt presence has to offer is a comparative perspective on how feelings of agency and accompaniment could come about in similar ways, albeit in very different scenarios. For example, the involvement of the TPJ in presence experiences overlaps with evidence from voice-hearing: the posterior section of the superior temporal gyrus, extending up into the TPJ area, is often implicated in fMRI studies of hallucination occurrence (Jardri et al., 2011); the TPJ is a target for neurostimulation in the treatment of problematic voices (Moseley et al., 2015); and there is evidence of resting connectivity differences in the same area in voice-hearers (Diederen et al., 2013). Thank you to Edelweiss, Penguin Books and Laura Purcell for the opportunity to read and review an advance copy. An asylum, a menacing house, journals found from the past, throw in Gothic and Victorian and I am all over it. Elsie, pregnant with her first child, travels to her husband's estate, called the Bridge. It is the middle of the 1800s and her husband has just died from unknown causes. Her story is a rags to riches one, daughter of a man who owned a match factory, she met and married her wealthy husband when he came to invest in the factory. Elsie herself has secrets held from her past, and the house she finds is not what she expected.The characters were well-developed – I appreciated every one of them and how they fit into this sinister tale. I enjoyed each timeline – every story carried an important piece of this mysterious puzzle. While I enjoyed the atmosphere and uniqueness of this story, I had a hard time suspending my disbelief a few times. I still have some lingering questions relating to how a couple events transpired.
Bell, V. (2013). A community of one: social cognition and auditory verbal hallucinations. PLoS Biol, 11(12), e1001723. In some instances, dummy boards were used as props in elaborate practical jokes. The 18th-century Dutch artist and writer, Arnold Houbraken, describes a social gathering where a dummy board was placed at the door to greet the company. Some guests, mistaking the wooden figure for a maidservant, attempted to give it a tip, a source of great amusement to those watching. Fans of Gothic, atmospheric Victorian books should look no further - The Silent Companions should be right up your alley! This is Gothic done right! Have you ever read a book where the Author is going for Gothic and just fails to hit the mark? The Author not only hits the mark -she nails it. The crumbling estate is creepy and dreary. The countryside is dripping with atmosphere and dread. The villagers are hostile and refuse to help anyone at the country estate known as the Bridge. This story creeps along as does the feelings of dread and apprehension in this book. This story does jump around a little bit from the present day, to the past, to the not so distant past but it is never confusing. During the book, the reader sees the main character of Elise in a psychiatric hospital being evaluated by a psychiatrist. There has been a fire and Elise is believed to have started it and she is considered to be responsible for deaths which occurred before and during the fire. The reader also gets a glimpse into the year 1635, when a family lives at the country estate. The reader learns what occurred during the time and finally we see Elise moving into the estate and her time spent living in the home. I went from being an author at a small press, waking up at 5.30am every day to write before work, to the privilege of writing full-time as a client of one of the UK’s most sought-after literary agents.Jones, S.R., Fernyhough, C. & Meads, D. (2009). In a dark time: Development, validation, and correlates of the Durham Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Hallucinations Questionnaire. Personality and Individual Differences, 46(1), 30–34.
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