A genuinely creepy Victorian ghost story, it’ll keep you up half the night reading it . . . and you won’t want to turn off the light.”

I have always been interested in the significance of dreams. What is our brain trying to tell us, as… 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. A perfect read for a winter night . . . An intriguing, nuanced, and genuinely eerie slice of Victorian gothic.” There, we are granted a voyeuristic peek into gentrified Paris through Yi Jin’s eyes. And we are given a thoughtful story that explores the West’s perception and treatment of Eastern ‘treasures’. A political and thrilling story of love, loyalty, and belonging. Dann McDorman on West Heart Kill “In the end, both the detective and the killer must make a choice, whether to act from hate, or from love”One of the most well-written horror stories I’ve read this year, The Silent Companions is proper Gothic fare. . . . What is commendable is how Purcell is able to weave all these [classic] elements in a story that is layered and psychologically complex till the very end.” Elsie, pregnant and widowed, finds herself living in a gothic style manor house with unfriendly villagers, useless servants, one unlikable 'friend' and a whole heap of silent companions. These are just figures painted on boards but they have a tendency to move around and cause unpleasant events. They reminded me of the stone angels on Doctor Who which also only moved when you were not looking at them! As I said, spooky! Separately we have a timeline from after this era, when Elsie is in a psychiatric hospital and unable to speak. Her doctor tries to get her to tell the story of what happened.

This was a sisters read and many of us had questions at the end. Trying to figure out exactly what happened, but I often think a book that causes one to question what they just read, is the mark of an interesting and worthy read. A completely creeptastic tale that had me jumping at the slightest sounds - warning: read with all the lights on!Here’s a modern gothic horror story that will go down as one of the greats of this generation. The Silent Companionswas published in 2017 and, while it is a gothic horror, it delves deeper than that. I read The Silent Companions as a spooky Halloween read with six of my Traveling Sisters and this was the perfect read that brought out an extra creepiness to our Halloween. Wilkinson, S. & Bell, V. (2016). The representation of agents in auditory verbal hallucinations. Mind & Language, 31(1), 104–126.

Similarly benevolent experiences are also reported by people in extreme survival situations. Known collectively as ‘Third Man’ experiences (see box, over), accounts of guiding or accompanying presences in polar treks, mountaineering expeditions, sea accidents and natural disasters are numerous. The presences described are usually human-like, close by and feel like they share an affinity with the person experiencing them. Occasionally they are associated with sounds or words (Geiger, 2010, p126), or vague visions, such as a shadow or outline, but more commonly such presences are described without any sensory correlates. Like other presence experiences, though, the Third Man usually takes up a distinct spatial location, in some cases appearing to lead those in peril to safety. A sound, a noise. The creaking floor, the rustling of leaves, the whirling wind. Or maybe something else.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. It’s a shame, because I feel like with so many of the same characters, and the same level of creepiness, the book could have taken that and turned it on its head effectively. If instead of the ghosts being just malicious, if they were the aftereffects of injustice and harm – the harm of Hetta’s exclusion from her family, the harm of the mistreatment of the Romani children, the harm of people’s fear of women’s medical gifts and herb crafts that was called witchcraft. But instead it’s a muddled mess. Thinking about hearing voices in this way is not necessarily new. Bell (2013) and Wilkinson and Bell (2016) have argued for social representations being key to understanding how voices are experienced and persist over time; various psychotherapeutic approaches focus on the social relations that voices seem to create (e.g. Hayward et al., 2011), and the Hearing Voices Movement itself has long argued for an understanding of the experience that involves interaction with voices as meaningful entities. Thank you to Netgalley, Laura Purcell and Penguin Books for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.