The Silent Companions references The Turn of the Screw, which echoes its theme of an unreliable narrator and a gothic Victorian setting. On the tongue red fruit presents, red plum and red currants, and vanilla warms at the end.
Strong dark fruit fragrance-blackberries, black plums, blueberries, suggestion of tobacco leaf and pine. We drank Witching Hour non-reserve for House of Spines, so we tried out the Reserve for this spooky read! To Purcell’s great credit, the Stuart-era history of the house was not nebulous at all, but well-researched and considered. This is perhaps due to the unexpected depth and attention given to the storyline in the past. Experiencing the same house in different time periods can be overdone, but it was exciting and creepy in The Silent Companions. The pacing of the story was well done: the movement between the diary excerpts and the narrator’s plotline keeps the suspense building to excellent effect. After learning how Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird benefited from the guidance of a strong editor, we appreciate how a story could be tidied up, gently re-directed, or turned in an altogether different direction. We felt a good editor would have pointed this out to Purcell. The real struggle we had with the story was the staggering number of red herrings it was just too many. They came out pretty freaking creepy! I hid them around the house (and one in the bathroom) for maximum creepiness. Jump to The Silent Companions discussion questionsįor this book club meet-up, I made paper dummy boards/ silent companions. While the book did have its issues, some are due to misled expectations. (We got more scares from Annihilation.) The story is a slow-burn Victorian gothic that, sadly, was marketed hard as scare-your-pants-off horror story. The group agreed that while The Silent Companions certainly delivered on creepy, it rarely got into the realm of scary. We chose The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell as our spooky book for the Halloween season.
After that, things devolve pretty quickly and we learn that everyone has secrets-including the house. She finds an antique in her new home, a carved wooden figure, a Silent Companion. How about we stay inside with our own calm thoughts to keep us company, eh? As you can guess, this does not work out well for Elsie. We’ll meet the small resentful staff for the first time, and the local villagers who are not all that friendly either. Gas-lighting or true haunting? Past trauma or mental health condition? In The Silent Companions, we take the bumpy carriage ride with Elsie, a newly widowed pregnant woman, to her isolated estate in Victorian England.
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