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The Silent Companions: The perfect spooky tale to curl up with this autumn

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Alderson-Day, B. & Fernyhough, C. (in press). Auditory verbal hallucinations: Social but how? Journal of Consciousness Studies.

Blanke, O., Arzy, S. & Landis, T. (2008). Illusory perceptions of the human body and self. In G. Goldenberg & B. Miller (Eds.) Handbook of clinical neurology (3rd series, Vol. 88, pp.429–458). Edinburgh: Elsevier. I really wanted to read this book after I came across the blurb, and the reality certainly didn't disappoint. The narrative is shared by two young women in Victorian England, Dorothea, a wealthy heiress, and Ruth, a seamstress imprisoned for the murder of her mistress. Dorothea has an interest in phrenology, the study of peoples skulls to see if they have a propensity for murder among other things, and when she comes across Ruth during a charitable visit to the local gaol, she can't help but try to read her skull. As the two women become closer over the course of Dorothea's visits, Ruth's story unveils, her shattered childhood, her abuse from her employers, and the fact that she seems to be able to control peoples fates through the clothes she makes for them.

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Cheyne, J.A. (2011). Sensed presences. In J.D. Blom & I.E.C. Sommer (Eds.) Hallucinations (pp.219–234). New York: Springer. Elsie is pregnant, newly widowed and about to move into her husband’s family home The Bridge. It is full of rumours and the local villagers are terrified of the house. Elsie thinks it’s all ridiculous. It’s just an old house. Together with her husbands cousin Sarah she begins working on getting the house clean and prepared for the baby’s arrival. When they come across these wooden figures referred to as companions, Elsie finds them intriguing and decides to bring them out. Wilkinson, S. & Bell, V. (2016). The representation of agents in auditory verbal hallucinations. Mind & Language, 31(1), 104–126. The Silent Companions is a gothic, foreboding, spooky ghost story. It is very well written and I especially enjoyed the setting of the crumbling mansion (named The Bridge) in England. The story alternates between events of 1635 to the present day of 1865.

All these different elements combine to make an eerie story where everything creeps along, I thought it might have been too slow but honestly it was perfect to build up this feeling of dread. And, oh, did I find out. Let me tell you: There are definitely times I now get up in the middle of the night and look askance at the wooden furniture in my room, too.Although this kind of experience is not necessarily a frequent part of how voice-hearers describe their experience, it is also not a one-off. Anecdotally voice-hearers will talk about their voices being present without speaking, taking up spatial positions even when silent, and in some cases ‘looking’ at the world alongside the voice-hearer. In the Hearing the Voice phenomenology survey published last year (Woods et al., 2015), 69 per cent of a sample of 153 voice-hearers described their voices as being characterful or having a distinct personality, while 66 per cent associated their voices with unusual bodily sensations or changes. And in some cases, descriptions of presence were explicitly made: I went from being an author at a small press, waking up at 5.30am every day to write before work, to the privilege of writing full-time as a client of one of the UK’s most sought-after literary agents.

Soon, these silent companions were brought downstairs where they frightened the staff and appear to move and show up in various rooms. To make matters worse, the silent companions seem to multiply and more appear each day. Plus, several members of the household began to see strange things. Each person sees something different from others living in the home and everyone is upset by this except for the head House keeper, Mrs. Holt who has lived at the home for several years. She claims nothing bad has ever happened while she has been at the house. Sarah finds the diary of Anne Bainbridge, the inhabitants of the country estate over 200 years ago. This once prosperous and noble family fell to ruin in 1635, when the queen's horse was killed on their property and Anne herself was burned at the stake for being a witch. Bleuler, E. (1950). Dementia praecox; or, The group of schizophrenias (J. Zinkin, Trans.). New York: International Universities Press. (Original work published 1911) 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!It’s been five years since Raven Books published The Silent Companions, which went on to win the WHS Thumping Good Read award and was chosen by Zoe Ball for her ITV book club. For those who haven’t read this spine tingling tale yet, can you introduce it for us? 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. Was reading this on Halloween, and it was just creepy enough without being absolutely terrifying. The silent companions, things I had never heard of, make an appearance and keep making appearances despite the fact that they are gotten rid of time and time again. The journals from the past reveal the dabbling in of witchcraft and of terrible wrongs committed. As a reader I was never quite sure what was real and what was imagined. If what Elsie was seeing and experiencing was in her mind or an actual happening. Loved the Gothic, forboding style of this, the constant tension, and the mix between past and present. Other interesting characters are presented and one will have an important part in the twist at the end.

One of the biggest narrative successes of Downton Abbey was the character of Carson the butler and his relationship to his own position and the other members of the house. Thank you to Penguin books and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I enjoyed almost everything about this book. The Silent Companions has fire, murder, suicide, shady characters, witchcraft, and a depressing town. Its historical setting and interior of the nightmarish house are well drawn; the main characters are sympathetic; the villains are frightening but not outrageously horrific. Evil-doll stories have the potential to devolve into campiness, but that doesn't happen here. Laura Purcell does a good job setting up all the spooky elements for this story. We loved the spooky house, intriguing journals from the past, the hidden secrets and the creepy Silent Companions that had us shuttering with their creepiness. Bleuler, E. (1903). Extracampine Hallucinationen. Psychiatrisch-neurologische Wochenschrift, 25, 261–264.I currently have far too many physical and kindle copies of books. It’s nice to have an extensive library, a never-ending tbr list, but it can also feel quite overwhelming at times to decide what to read next. So, this is a group read with the Horror Aficionados group. Usually I save this type of story for cold winter evenings, but end up finding other things to read and forget 😅 Despite coming from such different contexts, the overlapping phenomenology of presence experiences raises the intriguing question of whether some underlying cognitive and neurological mechanisms may unite their occurrence. There are broadly three main hypotheses that attempt to explain felt presence: body-mapping, threat, and social representation (see Cheyne, 2011, for a review). And the Austen novel that most parallels Downton Abbey is Mansfield Park. The story of Fanny Price, a young woman who is forced to live with her wealthy uncle – a slave and plantation owner – and his wife in their stately home of Mansfield Park. Nielsen, T. (2007). Felt presence: Paranoid delusion or hallucinatory social imagery? Consciousness and Cognition, 16(4), 975–983. Fans of Gothic, atmospheric Victorian books should look no further - The Silent Companions should be right up your alley! This is Gothic done right! Have you ever read a book where the Author is going for Gothic and just fails to hit the mark? The Author not only hits the mark -she nails it. The crumbling estate is creepy and dreary. The countryside is dripping with atmosphere and dread. The villagers are hostile and refuse to help anyone at the country estate known as the Bridge. This story creeps along as does the feelings of dread and apprehension in this book. This story does jump around a little bit from the present day, to the past, to the not so distant past but it is never confusing. During the book, the reader sees the main character of Elise in a psychiatric hospital being evaluated by a psychiatrist. There has been a fire and Elise is believed to have started it and she is considered to be responsible for deaths which occurred before and during the fire. The reader also gets a glimpse into the year 1635, when a family lives at the country estate. The reader learns what occurred during the time and finally we see Elise moving into the estate and her time spent living in the home.

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