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

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What is unfortunately clichéd is the gaslighted, possibly mentally imbalanced female protagonist. Vaguely sexist, this kind of female character is in a lot of newer mysteries, usually with the addition of alcoholism. Purcell fashioned Elsie as fragile to create suspense and hold reader attention, but the cliché is falsely complex; making the reader unsure about a character's mental state is an easy, arguably lazy, way to create mystery.

Irresistibly creepy, this romps along, Purcell turning her screws with skill. It’s what crumpets and dismal afternoons were made for.” The TPJ is a multimodal area that is both anatomically and functionally diverse, so clear overlaps between voice and presence experiences are yet to be established. Nevertheless, for such phenomenologically unusual experiences, any clues that may shed light on overlapping or similar cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms are important to consider. And feelings of presence arguably provide a wealth of such clues: understanding the Third Man provides a model for how one’s own body could create the feeling of another; explanations of sleep paralysis highlight the role of negative affect and threat in driving unusual experiences; while the presences that follow bereavement provide examples of how identity without form can persist over time. Taken together, accounts of presence show us the ‘others’ that we carry with us at all times, the silent companions whose visits can either guide or haunt; support or confuse, comfort or terrify.Brugger, P., Regard, M. & Landis, T. (1997). Illusory reduplication of one’s own body: Phenomenology and classification of autoscopic phenomena. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 2(1), 19–38. The characters were well-developed – I appreciated every one of them and how they fit into this sinister tale. I enjoyed each timeline – every story carried an important piece of this mysterious puzzle. While I enjoyed the atmosphere and uniqueness of this story, I had a hard time suspending my disbelief a few times. I still have some lingering questions relating to how a couple events transpired. That unsettling, evocative smell of silence enveloped you. There it was again, in the shadow of the house—a lover’s whisper, seductive but dangerous. Yes, people say the end was a surprise, and it was. But, I think because of the side stories and characters, the reader was not allowed a chance to add two and two. I don't appreciate this kind of surprises personally. I'd like to have all the elements in front of me, and still the writer should be able to surprise me.

You could not explain fear; you could only feel it, roaring through the silence and striking your heart still." It was hard to process the sudden success of the book. One day I was in the office photocopying in my role as an assistant, then suddenly I was being asked to film for the Zoe Ball book club! Though much of it feels like a blur now, I remember the great day I spent with Juliet meeting the publishers who wanted to offer on the novel, being plied with cake and various Silent Companions-themed goodies. A perfect read for a winter night . . . An intriguing, nuanced, and genuinely eerie slice of Victorian gothic.”

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. Gothic is a term I had never really questioned before. Out of interest I looked up several definitions of Gothic Literature. Most definitions feature the traits ‘fear, horror, death, gloom and sometimes romance’. These sum up this book pretty well! My baby. Rotten to the core. Every memory of her childhood takes on a sordid, shameful appearance. Was she a demon from the very womb? But of course she was. What else could she be, at once unnatural and misbegotten?” More benevolent presences are also reported, however, with perhaps the most common examples coming from people who have recently been bereaved. In a review last year, Castelnovo and colleagues (2015) reported that up to 60 per cent of cases of bereavement are associated with some kind of hallucinatory experience, of which 32–52 per cent were felt presences. Strong feelings of loved ones still being present are often described in the first month of bereavement, but they can in some cases persist for many years. In contrast to sleep paralysis, the presence experienced is typically associated with comfort and longing rather than any sort of malevolent intent. The chill of The Silent Companionssneaks up on you and then settles in like a gray mist on a British moor . . . a shivery treat.”

This one is a bit spooky! Not horrific really - it would not keep me awake at night- but it is definitely on the creepy side. Granqvist, P., Fredrikson, M., Unge, P. et al. (2005). Sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by suggestibility, not by the application of transcranial weak complex magnetic fields. Neuroscience Letters, 379(1), 1–6. Layering on the dark and creepy, this intriguingly plottednovel is the full-blown Gothic, maintaining throughout an unsettling claustrophobic atmospheremixed with some unusual historical detail ― Daily Mail 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.What research on felt presence has to offer is a comparative perspective on how feelings of agency and accompaniment could come about in similar ways, albeit in very different scenarios. For example, the involvement of the TPJ in presence experiences overlaps with evidence from voice-hearing: the posterior section of the superior temporal gyrus, extending up into the TPJ area, is often implicated in fMRI studies of hallucination occurrence (Jardri et al., 2011); the TPJ is a target for neurostimulation in the treatment of problematic voices (Moseley et al., 2015); and there is evidence of resting connectivity differences in the same area in voice-hearers (Diederen et al., 2013).