Why a Booktrail?
Careful of what you might find in an abandoned gothic mansion..where the eyes of the paintings follow you wherever you go..
The Silent Companions
What you need to know before your trail
Newly married, newly widowed Elsie is sent to see out her pregnancy at her late husband’s crumbling country estate, The Bridge.
With her new servants resentful and the local villagers actively hostile, Elsie only has her husband’s awkward cousin for company. Or so she thinks. But inside her new home lies a locked room, and beyond that door lies a two-hundred-year-old diary and a deeply unsettling painted wooden figure – a Silent Companion – that bears a striking resemblance to Elsie herself…
Travel Guide
Victorian England
Fayford is fictional you might be relieved to know..(thebooktrail features Colchester as this is the author’s hometown and is the oldest city in England with a gothic castle….)
The setting here is an old, crumbling, gothic house filled with history as well as something else….
A family returns after many years, the house abandoned…but then that is the question – as has not someone been seen there?
With the villagers seemingly suspicious of it and afraid to darken its doors. No one from the village works here. And why is that?
“They’re scared of the place. Gives them the morbs”
With strange things happening inside its long dark corridors, with doors mysteriously opening, items vanishing into thin air only to appear in another room. And the figures, the silent companions…dolls who seem to have a life of their own. If only they could communicate…
The grand gothic mansion is evoked with style. Remote, surrounded by mist and fog, isolated by the damp British countryside…
“Only a few lamps were lit, flaring in patches and revealing red flock wallpaper”
“The corridor conveyed an air of shabby grandeur. Tapestry sofas lurked against the walls with chipped marble busts dotted in between. They were horrible things , watching her with dead expressions, shadows creeping over their cheekbones and sinking into the sockets of their eyes….”
Booktrailer Review
Susan: @thebooktrailer
Oh my dear goodness. Do not read this at night. Be sure there are no dolls and no paintings in the room where you read it – or at least portraits. There are no locations as such in the novel – its all set in a gothic and creepy country house – but the vagueness simply adds to the old creaky house where things move and go missing.
The writing is deliciously gothic and atmospheric, the story lurks and even after you’ve read this, it stays with you.
This is gothic creepy and very real. What a ride and what a reading experience. Review to come but jeepers this is creepy stuff! Brilliantly evoked and with crisp clean writing. A storytelling experience and then some. The plot is sharp and the mystery compelling.
And what about that cover? Chillingly immersive. I won’t forget this in a hurry. I can’t wait to see what else this author writes in the future
Booktrail Boarding Pass: The Silent Companions
Destination: England Author/Guide: Laura Purcell Departure Time: 1635, 1865
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