Welcome to the Speculative Chic Book Club! Each month, we invite you to join us in reading a book that is voted on by YOU, our readers. Following a short review, please feel free to discuss the book in the comments!
The Silent Companions (2018)
Author: Laura Purcell Pages: 315 (kindle)
Publisher: Penguin
Why I nominated this for book club: It’s Halloweeeeeeeen and I wanted to keep it spooky, and it’s 2018 so I wanted to keep it feminine, so I googled for lists of scary books and picked a couple written by ladies. This genre isn’t really my jam (my horror bookshelf on goodreads currently has 8 books on it, including this one) so I needed some list assistance. This one looked interesting.
The premise:
Some doors are locked for a reason.
When Elsie married handsome young heir Rupert Bainbridge, she believed she was destined for a life of luxury. But pregnant and widowed just weeks after their wedding, with her new servants resentful and the local villagers actively hostile, Elsie has only her late husband’s awkward cousin for company. Or so she thinks. Inside her new home lies a locked door, beyond which is a painted wooden figure—a silent companion—that bears a striking resemblance to Elsie herself. The residents of the estate are terrified of the figure, but Elsie tries to shrug this off as simple superstition—that is, until she notices the figure’s eyes following her.
A Victorian ghost story that evokes a most unsettling kind of fear, The Silent Companions is a tale that creeps its way through the consciousness in ways you least expect—much like the companions themselves.
Obvious spoiler warning for a book we should have all read.
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.
This is the year of our Lord 2018, I thought to myself, this can’t possibly be where this book is going. And thankfully, it wasn’t. While the two Romani characters are treated pretty terribly in this book (and then killed) . . . . I was going to say at least they weren’t later revealed to be the cause of everything but honestly, this still isn’t a good look. So yeah, there’s that in this book. Two Romani children die because of the prejudices present at the time.
It’s hard to transition from that statement but I’m going to try my best. I wasn’t blown away by this novel, I wasn’t really particularly surprised by anything that happened, but I do like that I wasn’t left guessing. The silent companions were a really good creeping menace, and the fact that they kept just appearing made my heart race a couple of times while reading.
I did find myself wondering toward the end about Elsie’s frequent blackouts/fainting spells. It was claimed late in the book that she was using these to protect herself from remembering horrible things, like the fact that she’d actually set the fire that ended up causing her father’s death. But I was left wondering if that was an actual memory when it turned out that Sarah at the end was actually Hetta. I’m not sure that it matters, though.
In conclusion: This book was so creepy I slept with a lamp on last night, just so I could check the corners for creeping wooden statues.
book reviewlaura purcellmerrinthe silent companions