Uncle Silas

Behind a bolted door, a man is found dead, and the bolt was thrown from the inside. No one is ever quite sure whether Silas Ruthyn did it, least of all his brother Austin, who spends the rest of his life trying to believe otherwise. So when Austin dies, his will performs an extraordinary act of faith: it makes Silas guardian of Maud, his only daughter, and ties her whole fortune to his good conduct. Maud arrives at Bartram-Haugh to find an uncle who looks less like a murderer than an ivory saint withered by opium, silver-haired, courteous, terrible in how gently he speaks. Sheridan Le Fanu builds his dread the way damp gets into a house, through the governess who watches too closely, the cousin too coarse to trust, the doors that lock the wrong way. By the night a bolt slides home on Maud's bedroom door, you will feel exactly how it is to be legally at the mercy of a man you cannot prove is evil, in a house built to keep the truth in the dark.