Here are 100 books that The Silent Companions fans have personally recommended if you like
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The first books I loved were Gothic classics like Jane Eyre and Rebecca, because of their isolated settings and secretive characters. When I first started writing, it was always stories about communities–the first novel I wrote featured a retirement village and a circus. Maybe that’s because I love observing communities in everyday life, like local pubs in which everybody has their place. When domestic suspense novels really took off, I started devouring crime books with close-knit settings and soon was writing them, too. I love the claustrophobia, the backstories, the landscape, the web of relationships. It can be done in so many different and brilliant ways.
Continuing with the Gothic theme, I have to mention one of my all-time favorite books. The estate of Manderley is almost another character in this novel, looming large over the story along with the legacy of its dead mistress. And the community poses an immediate threat to the book’s unnamed narrator, the new wife of the estate’s owner, when she comes in as an outsider and gets the cold shoulder from Manderley’s staff. Her desperate attempts to win everybody over lead to some gloriously nail-biting moments.
But what I adore about this novel is how it slowly reveals that the community’s loyalties are not what they seem. Even the significance of rooms and objects in the house–like Rebecca’s writing desk or the sound of the sea from a particular window–changes as the story unfolds.
* 'The greatest psychological thriller of all time' ERIN KELLY * 'One of the most influential novels of the twentieth century' SARAH WATERS * 'It's the book every writer wishes they'd written' CLARE MACKINTOSH
'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . .'
Working as a lady's companion, our heroine's outlook is bleak until, on a trip to the south of France, she meets a handsome widower whose proposal takes her by surprise. She accepts but, whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory…
An avid reader, I began a project in 2012 to read one short story a week in supernatural mysteries, ghost stories, and quiet horror genres. I began with the classic authors: Poe, MR James, Lovecraft, Shelley, Stoker, du Maurier, etc. I began a blog, Reading Fiction Blog, and posted these free stories with my reviews (I’m still posting today). Over the years, it turned into a compendium of fiction. Today, I have nearly 400 short stories by over 150 classic and now contemporary authors in the blog Index. I did this because I wanted to learn more about writing dark fiction and who better to learn from than the masters?
I adore reading atmospheric adventures of mystery, supernatural, and ghostly powers; this book has these values in abundance. Noemi’s alluring character is smart, savvy, and admirably vulnerable. Loved her. At High House in the Mexican countryside, Noemi discovers ghostly entities repeatedly forming blisters across the walls. How mysterious and threatening; I was fascinated.
The best part of the novel for me was the emotional intelligence of the characters because their behavior is both suspiciously rational and heart-stopping clever. Gripping as all heck. This family was obsessed with a relentless desire to rule and control their destiny at all costs via Otherworld powers. Absolutely compelling. I was breathless along with Noemi at every step as she was drawn into the dangers and treacherous family secrets that threatened to kill her.
The award-winning author of Gods of Jade and Shadow (one of the 100 best fantasy novels of all time, TIME magazine) returns with a mesmerising feminist Gothic fantasy, in which a glamorous young socialite discovers the haunting secrets of a beautiful old mansion in 1950s Mexico.
He is trying to poison me. You must come for me, Noemi. You have to save me.
When glamorous socialite Noemi Taboada receives a frantic letter from her newlywed cousin begging to be rescued from a mysterious doom, it's clear something is desperately amiss. Catalina has always had a flair for the dramatic, but…
My name is Annemarie and I’ve been reading stories almost as soon as I was taught how to read. I’ve also been writing them. My fascination with the supernatural came about, I guess because an active imagination for a small child comes almost naturally from a fear of the dark. The dark held many terrors for me, and in a perverse contrariness, this prompted an interest in supernatural beings. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all real, and the more we know about them, the better. Or at least, that’s what I deduce from my never flagging interest, and I guess that’s why there’s always an element of the supernatural/paranormal in all my stories.
I picked this book up from a second-hand street bookshop. It was the wisteria that did it. Something about those climbing vines made me fall right into the world of Lestat and Louis, and I’ve never fallen out again. Also, I love love, and there’s nothing more intriguing than three unrelated people/beings managing to stay together for sixty-five years.
Of course, there was murder and mayhem, but the love endured, and my secret romantic heart ate that shit up.
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Anne Rice, this sensuously written spellbinding classic remains 'the most successful vampire story since Bram Stoker's Dracula' (The Times)
In a darkened room a young man sits telling the macabre and eerie story of his life - the story of a vampire, gifted with eternal life, cursed with an exquisite craving for human blood.
When Interview with the Vampire was published the Washington Post said it was a 'thrilling, strikingly original work of the imagination . . . sometimes horrible, sometimes beautiful, always unforgettable'. Now, more than forty years since its release, Anne…
On Draakensky Windmill Estate, magick and mystery rule. Sketch artist Charlotte Knight is hired to live on the estate while illustrating poetry under the direction of the reclusive spinster, and wind witch, Jaa Morland—who believes in ghosts. Charlotte quickly encounters the voice…
My name is Mia Dalia. I write dark speculative fiction across genres. A lot of it is psychological horror, which I love! My latest novel features a rather unique haunted house and a family who spend their summer vacation there. Hauntings are a theme I have visited before in shorter forms and were very excited to explore in full. My goal here was to deconstruct the myth of an all-American happy family within the frame of a classic may-or-may-not-be-haunted house. Those who have dared to stay in Haven have been profoundly unsettled. It is a hungry house, always looking for more visitors. I hope you’ll come for a stay!
It is impossible to talk about haunted house books and not mention the foremother of them all, The House of the Haunted Hill. I love everything about it from its brilliant use of setting as a character to its tone of creeping unease to the way the readers are slowly drawn into its madness.
This book is a UR-text in the genre and quite revolutionary for its time in many ways: being authored by a female writer, featuring a queer icon of Theodora, etc. But most of all, it’s just a really great read and a true classic. Granted, the characters in it are not exactly on vacation, but all the same, in the end they probably wish they had spent their summer in a different house.
Part of a new six-volume series of the best in classic horror, selected by Academy Award-winning director of The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro
Filmmaker and longtime horror literature fan Guillermo del Toro serves as the curator for the Penguin Horror series, a new collection of classic tales and poems by masters of the genre. Included here are some of del Toro's favorites, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Ray Russell's short story "Sardonicus," considered by Stephen King to be "perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written," to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and stories…
I’ve loved Gothic fiction since I was a teen, though back then, I didn’t know it was Gothic. I just liked the creepiness, the often-isolated heroine, and the things-aren’t-what-they-seem murkiness of the stories. One of my first reads was Jane Eyre, which has remained a favorite. Though I didn’t like history in school (too much memorization!), I read several historical fiction books from different eras that fascinated me. These things, combined with another genre favorite—mystery/thriller, led to my first book. It turns out that all those things I’d gravitated to in my decades of reading became the things I most wanted to write about - mystery/thriller historical fiction with elements of Gothic.
Nobody does characters like Jess Kidd. Every person in this story is bizarre—a monster, misfit, or malefactor—yet not one feels contrived. I adored Bridie Devine, a small, rotund, pipe-smoking detective who begins to see the same ghost everywhere she goes.
Bridie’s quarry is a strange girl who’s been kidnapped and might (depending on who you ask) have supernatural powers or be a “lovely grotesque” who’s caught the eye of collectors. I fell in love with Kidd’s imaginative Victorian London, where nothing is as it seems, and evil lurks around every bend.
London, 1863. Bridie Devine, the finest female detective of her age, is taking on her toughest case yet. Reeling from her last job and with her reputation in tatters, a remarkable puzzle has come her way. Christabel Berwick has been kidnapped. But Christabel is no ordinary child. She is not supposed to exist.
As Bridie fights to recover the stolen child she enters a world of fanatical anatomists, crooked surgeons and mercenary showmen. Anomalies are in fashion, curiosities are the thing, and fortunes are won and lost in the name of entertainment. The public love a spectacle and Christabel may…
I was an English major in college. In pursuing my love of books and language, I fell into a love of history. The passion for history began with author biographies as I tried to understand how the culture affected various authors’ writings. This is why my history strength resides in European history, because most of my favorite authors come from Europe. The more I read of the biographies, I often came across historical events I wasn’t knowledgeable about and so fell down a rabbit hole of historical research. The more I learn, the more I love history!
I love true crime and I love history. This book combined the two in an enthralling, often poetic read.
It’s about the case of Lizzie Borden. In this multi-POV story, Schmidt gets into the characters of Lizzie, her sister, a housemaid, and Lizzie’s uncle to explore how the crime unfolded.
It leans literary in its narration style, but I personally like that. The details used in the story really make the reader feel present in the scenes and get into the minds of the characters.
Haunting, gripping and gorgeously written, SEE WHAT I HAVE DONE by Sarah Schmidt is a re-imagining of the unsolved American true crime case of the Lizzie Borden murders, for fans of BURIAL RITES and MAKING A MURDERER.
'Eerie and compelling' Paula Hawkins 'Stunning' Sunday Times 'Gripping... outstanding' Observer 'Glittering' Irish Times
Just after 11am on 4th August 1892, the bodies of Andrew and Abby Borden are discovered. He's found on the sitting room sofa, she upstairs on the bedroom floor, both murdered with an axe.
It is younger daughter Lizzie who is first on the scene, so it is Lizzie…
I am a child of the South, hailing as I do from Warm Springs, Georgia, best known for Roosevelt’s Little White House. My family, indeed the entire community as far as I can tell, were in the thrall of conservative Christian values that had no room for people like me—gay (although I had no word for it for a long time) and physically misshapen (something to be hidden under layers of clothing). I was a boy and then teenager living on the fringes, always on the outside looking in, seeking approval or defiantly hiding to process the uniquely Southern dysfunction around me. I know these protagonists. They’re my people.
The Cicada Tree is a wonderful Southern Gothic magical realism mash-up leavened with humor and illuminating reflections on the human condition told in voices that drip with authentic Southernisms. Analeise Newell, this novel’s protagonist, is a complex, not-as-kind-as-she-knows-she-should-be eleven-year-old who drinks whiskey and is a piano prodigy. Her close friendship with Etta Mae, a budding coloratura soprano, sheds light on accepted racial inequities in the Deep South of the 1950s, building to (in the author’s words) a “chain of cataclysmic events with life-altering consequences-all of it unfolding to the maddening whir of a cicada song.”
WHEN AN ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD, WHISKY DRINKING, PIANO PRODIGY ENCOUNTERS A WEALTHY FAMILY POSSESSING SUPERNATURAL BEAUTY, HER ENSUING OBSESSION UNLEASHES FAMILY SECRETS AND A CATACLYSMIC PLAGUE OF CICADAS. The summer of 1956, a brood of cicadas descends upon Providence, Georgia, a natural event with supernatural repercussions, unhinging the life of Analeise Newell, an eleven-year-old piano prodigy. Amidst this emergence, dark obsessions are stirred, uncanny gifts provoked, and secrets unearthed. During a visit to Mistletoe, a plantation owned by the wealthy Mayfield family, Analeise encounters Cordelia Mayfield and her daughter Marlissa, both of whom possess an otherworldly beauty, a lineal trait regarded as…
I’ve loved Gothic fiction since I was a teen, though back then, I didn’t know it was Gothic. I just liked the creepiness, the often-isolated heroine, and the things-aren’t-what-they-seem murkiness of the stories. One of my first reads was Jane Eyre, which has remained a favorite. Though I didn’t like history in school (too much memorization!), I read several historical fiction books from different eras that fascinated me. These things, combined with another genre favorite—mystery/thriller, led to my first book. It turns out that all those things I’d gravitated to in my decades of reading became the things I most wanted to write about - mystery/thriller historical fiction with elements of Gothic.
This book checked a lot of boxes for me from the jump: a decrepit infirmary, the grisliness of 19th-century medicine, a soot-filled London that seethes with filth, secrets, and evil.
This book is the first in a series featuring one of the best protagonists I’ve encountered: Jem Flockhart, an intelligent young woman who must disguise herself as a boy to continue her work at St. Saviour’s Infirmary as an apothecary. The mystery at its heart was every bit as Gothic as I’d hoped.
Ramshackle and crumbling, trapped in the past and resisting the future, St. Saviour's Infirmary awaits demolition. Within its stinking wards and cramped corridors, the doctors bicker and backstab. Ambition, jealousy, and loathing seethe beneath the veneer of professional courtesy. Always an outsider, and with a secret of her own to hide, apothecary Jem Flockhart observes everything but says nothing.
And then six tiny coffins are uncovered, inside each a handful of dried flowers and a bundle of mouldering rags. When Jem comes across these strange relics hidden inside the infirmary's old chapel, her quest to understand their meaning prises open…
Gothic fiction is the Wednesday’s child of literature, rife with melancholic darkness and woe. More a mood than a subgenre, it enhances paranormals, suspense, mystery, and romance novels alike. I love the creepiness of it all, how the words make me long to burrow under a warm blankie with a cup of tea and wallow in their morbidity. And no one did horror-stricken grief better than the ladies (although Poe gave them a run for their money.) Ann Radcliffe, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Mary Shelley, Daphne du Maurier…these were the early Queens of Goth. Here are five for the modern age. Read ‘em and weep.
Published in February, 2022, this is the most modern of my five choices. An impressive debut by an author who lives in a one-hundred-and-fourteen-year-old haunted house,The Hitman’s Daughter embodies modern Gothic, with its atmospheric setting in a haunted, historic, past-its-prime hotel/chateau, a gruesome murder, a whiff of the supernatural, and a kick-ass heroine (Mave) plagued by her past (and daddy issues.) Thanks to a massive New Year’s Eve blizzard that traps Mave and the chateau’s high-society guests at the scene of a crime, this felt like a twisted, claustrophobic game of Clue.
The Château du Ciel was once the destination for the rich and famous to play, drink and ski—complete with a private railway to shuttle those desiring extra privacy—now, however, the guests are few and far between. The New Year’s Eve party was supposed to hoist the rundown hotel back to its former status, until a massive blizzard hits, trapping the guests who’ve come to celebrate the grand hotel’s last hurrah. The circumstances might even be romantic, if the hotel wasn't reputed to be haunted.
When hotel employee Mave Michael finds the resident artist dead, and shortly thereafter hotel security finds…
I’ve loved Gothic fiction since I was a teen, though back then, I didn’t know it was Gothic. I just liked the creepiness, the often-isolated heroine, and the things-aren’t-what-they-seem murkiness of the stories. One of my first reads was Jane Eyre, which has remained a favorite. Though I didn’t like history in school (too much memorization!), I read several historical fiction books from different eras that fascinated me. These things, combined with another genre favorite—mystery/thriller, led to my first book. It turns out that all those things I’d gravitated to in my decades of reading became the things I most wanted to write about - mystery/thriller historical fiction with elements of Gothic.
This book, quite frankly, blew my mind. That women in times past were forced into the role of sin eaters to take on the transgressions of the dying so the latter could ascend to heaven was disturbing, to say the least.
I felt for May, a fourteen-year-old girl who is newly sentenced to the fate of a sin eater—a job in which she is to remain poor, mute, and bear the ostracization of her community. But what kept me turning pages is the chilling mystery at its center. In the alternate Elizabethan court in which the book is set, someone is poisoning those close to the Queen and hiding a long-buried secret. May must stay one step ahead of the killer if she’s to navigate a corrupt, vicious court and a fiend who wants her dead.
An old adage says there are really only two stories: a man goes on a voyage, and a stranger arrives in town. This is the third: a woman breaks the rules . . .
Can you uncover the truth when you're forbidden from speaking it?
A Sin Eater's duty is a necessary evil: she hears the confessions of the dying, eats their sins as a funeral rite. Stained by these sins, she is shunned and silenced, doomed to live in exile at the edge of town.
Recently orphaned May Owens is just fourteen, only concerned with where her next meal…
