That unsettling, evocative smell of silence enveloped you. There it was again, in the shadow of the house—a lover’s whisper, seductive but dangerous. The chill of The Silent Companionssneaks up on you and then settles in like a gray mist on a British moor . . . a shivery treat.” Layering on thedark and creepy, thisintriguingly plottednovel is the full-blownGothic, maintaining throughoutan unsettling claustrophobic atmospheremixed with some unusual historical detail.” The Court Dancertells the story of Yi Jin, a young woman who dances at the court of the emperor of the Joseon Dynasty.

Hss. Hss. Hss. Five big stars for this Gothic horror show, to all my Goodreads friends who recommended this, "Thank you!" I have had a scary book appetite lately, but none of the books I devoured quite satisfied the craving until this delicious nugget. Short, but terrifying, this story begins with a woman in an asylum who has been drugged into insensibility. It’s a tale of love and class divide, a scathing commentary on the biases and prejudices between classes which were prevalent in Austen’s time. If you’re looking for books like Downton Abbey, Mansfield Park is your first call, without a doubt.Wilkinson, S. & Bell, V. (2016). The representation of agents in auditory verbal hallucinations. Mind & Language, 31(1), 104–126. Forget any ideas of a country idyll though. The Bridge huddles miserably in the muddy countryside, neglected and forlorn; surrounded by a straggle of cottages, whose inhabitants seem to view the big house with suspicion. As locals refuse to work there, Elsie finds housekeeper Edna Holt and two maids, plus she is accompanied by Sarah, a poor relation of her husband, who is acting as her companion. Yes, I definitely should have mentioned the disability/evilness angle, which is also disappointing. Everything you said in your comment I’m just nodding along with. This could have been better, it’s such a creepy concept, but it was poorly executed. This a dual timeline tale, alternating between the 1800’s and 1600’s, all based around a gothic castle in England with a long, tragic history. As the story unfolds, you learn more about what has occurred to put the haunted in the house. I definitely recommend this book to any reader who likes gothic horror, ghost stories or darkly creepy tales.

Sarah discovers a diary of her ancestor, Anne Bainbridge, from the early 1600s. The diary tells the story of Anne’s daughter, Hetta. After having only sons, Anne wished for a daughter and apparently brought Hetta into the world through herbal witchcraft. But something went terribly wrong, and Hetta’s tongue never developed enough to allow her to speak. Hetta is strangely drawn to the group of silent companions brought into the house by Anne, and a series of gruesome events soon follows. Discussion: A little under half way through this book I almost noped out of it. We were in the 1600s timeline, watching Anne be terrible to this poor Romani child (only this book used the slur) and I thought we were headed to a place where the Romani child cursed the home because the mistress wouldn’t let him take care of her horses. A creepy, unsettlingtale that I had to finish reading in broad daylight― Stylist, 'Must-Read Books' The show encapsulated not only the day-to-day lives, relationships, and dramas of the English gentry of the time, but also the lives of their servants, cooks, and drivers.Its protagonists are sharply-defined characters whose relationships and actions very much reflect the same tone and politics seen in Downton Abbey, which is what makes The Silent Companions a surprising but fitting addition to the list of books like Downton Abbey. An often-underrated novel of its time, North and South is one of those books like Downton Abbey which focusses far more on the working classes and their struggles than it does the gentry. The house has some history and none of it has been good. Many have died at the estate and the locals believe the house is cursed and they are superstitious about the history surrounding a witch having lived at the home. The longer Elise stays at the home, the more she sees the silent companions and stranger things begin to happen at an alarming rate. Is she hallucinating? Is she insane as her brother believes? Are the ghosts of the past terrorizing the house? Is everything is as it seems?

A perfect read for a winter night . . . An intriguing, nuanced, and genuinely eerie slice of Victorian gothic.” That said, the second half of the book was pretty compelling and readable, so at least it had that going for it, even if I didn’t like the answer to where the evil was coming from, or how everything turned out.Thank you to Penguin books and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Bell, V. (2013). A community of one: social cognition and auditory verbal hallucinations. PLoS Biol, 11(12), e1001723. When I was a boy, my dad was stationed on a U.S. Army base in what was then West Germany. There was…