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.
I am also not much of a horror person, and not a gothic novel person, so I am not the intended audience of this one. I agree that it was very effectively creepy, but the story also gave me the creeps in a bad way. Not just the misuse of the Romani characters, but the overall plot. It seemed like the author was aiming for a feminist slant, but it didn’t feel feminist to me.
I don’t like stories about evil children, and I especially didn’t like the implication that disability is connected with evilness, or the disability and/or evilness come from trying to go against God (or nature).
I also felt like there were some plot threads and characters raised and then never fully used or developed – Anne’s sister, the minister in 1865.
Finally, there was some weirdness going on about class that rubbed me the wrong way. Elsie is presented as having risen ‘above her station’ by marrying Rupert, and so a number of times expresses compassion for poor and lower class people, but she’s also really rude to the servants throughout the book. Not to mention being inexcusably rude to poor Sarah. Sarah was the only character I really liked, so it was depressing to see her either replaced or possessed by Hetta at the end.
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.
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.
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.
I actually really enjoyed this book.
I don’t see any problem with using the term Gypsy ( coming from traveller stock myself). I think it’s important to remember that the terms, superstitions and fears of the characters are particular to the time period and not a comment on how we think today.
I did have a problem with Elsie treating her maids and “lessers” poorly, considering where she had come from, though she did have plans to help the village.
I would have liked more explanation about her own parents, especially her mother, as her treatment at their hands was only hinted at.
Overall I think it was well paced and kept my attention.