The Silent Companions

The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell is a standalone gothic horror novel published in October 2017 by Raven Books, winner of the WHSmith Thumping Good Read Award 2018 and a selection of both the Zoe Ball and Radio 2 Book Clubs. A former bookseller, Purcell writes Victorian gothic fiction with the specificity and atmosphere of someone who has read widely in the tradition she's working in - and this, her debut novel for Raven, remains the book most often named as the definitive entry point to her work.

Readers who want to check content warnings before going in should note that the novel includes cruelty to animals, alongside the psychological and supernatural horrors of the main narrative.

The novel opens in an asylum, with Elsie Bainbridge - badly burned, unable to speak, facing charges of murder and arson. From there it steps back to 1865: Elsie has been widowed barely a month into her marriage to Rupert Bainbridge, left pregnant and alone, despatched to his family's estate, The Bridge, to see out her confinement. The house has a reputation in the village of Fayford that nobody is quite willing to explain directly. Servants will not work there. The locals keep their distance. Within the decaying rooms of The Bridge, Elsie and Rupert's cousin Sarah discover a locked door, and behind it something odd: painted wooden figures, life-size, made to resemble real people. Silent companions - actually a real historical artform from seventeenth-century England, also known as dummy boards, used to create the impression of occupancy in empty rooms. These ones, Elsie notices, do not stay where she leaves them.

Purcell structures the novel across three timelines. The asylum framing establishes the question the book spends its length answering: how did Elsie end up here, and what happened at The Bridge? The 1865 chapters follow Elsie in the house as the companions multiply and the atmosphere darkens. A third thread - the 1635 diary of Anne Bainbridge, a direct ancestor of Rupert - slowly reveals a history of grief, Ancient & Forbidden Magic, and a daughter born mute who became the subject of superstition and fear. The connection between Anne's story and what Elsie is now experiencing gives the Multiple Timelines structure real thematic purpose: this isn't simply parallel narratives, but a pattern repeating across centuries.

The Paranormal elements are handled with deliberate ambiguity throughout most of the novel. Purcell keeps open, for a long time, the question of whether Elsie is genuinely witnessing the companions move or whether grief, isolation, and the psychological weight of her situation are producing something that resembles madness rather than haunting. That uncertainty is the engine of the novel's sustained Existential Dread - the horror of not knowing whether to trust your own eyes sits underneath every encounter with the figures, making each one unsettling in a way that a more straightforward ghost story couldn't quite achieve. Elsie's Unreliable Narrator status is never resolved cheaply.

The Trauma and Healing running through Elsie's arc - widowhood, pregnancy, grief, physical deterioration - grounds the supernatural in character rather than letting it function purely as atmosphere. The Dark Secrets the house contains go back further than Rupert's death, further even than living memory, and the Mystery and Secrets Revealed across all three timelines builds to a finale that has haunted many readers considerably longer than they expected from a Victorian pastiche.

Grimdark Magazine called this the novel that made them fall in love with gothic horror, describing it as "the perfect entry point for readers new to the genre." For fans of Victorian atmosphere, understated supernatural dread, and historical fiction that does serious work with its research - the silent companions themselves were a genuine artform whose history Purcell draws on with real care - this is one of the finest examples of contemporary gothic fiction.