Junior takes Dino out of the facility for a day trip and sets out to perform the same ritual that their father attempted many years ago. Dino now lives in a residential facility, and Junior is the father of a son who has died.

The book then does a time jump, many years into the future.

I also hated the implication that abled-ness is related to the possession of a kind of “life force,” and that the extraction of such life force would lead to disabled-ness. As far as the reader is able to tell, he is a saintly innocent, acted upon by parties of varying good (Junior) and bad (his father, prejudiced kids at his school) intentions. I was, let’s say, uneasy with the book at this point: We have no sense of Dino’s interiority. Dino’s worsening seizures are a result of this vampiric effort by Junior’s late father. He believes that his father is coming back to help him and Dino, and that there may be some way to help his father cross back over the border between life and death.Īs Junior investigates what’s going on with his father’s ghost, however, he begins to realize that his father is actually draining Dino of life in order to cross back into life himself. Junior’s father is dead, but he thinks that he sees the ghost of his father in his house. (Assume there will be spoilers throughout.) The protagonist’s younger brother Dino 1 has intellectual and physical disabilities, and his seizures have recently been getting more severe. The residents of The Bridge are terrified of the figure, but Elsie tries to shrug this off as simple superstition-that is, until she notices the figure's eyes following her.Cover of Stephen Graham Jones’s Mapping the Interior Inside her new home lies a locked door, beyond which is a painted wooden figure-a silent companion-that bears a striking resemblance to Elsie herself. But with her husband dead just weeks after their marriage, her new servants resentful, and the local villagers actively hostile, Elsie has only her husband's awkward cousin for company. When Elsie married handsome young heir Rupert Bainbridge, she believed she was destined for a life of luxury.

'When newly widowed Elsie is sent to see out her pregnancy at her late husband's crumbling country estate, The Bridge, what greets her is far from the life of wealth and privilege she was expecting.

The silent companion book