The Residency by C.D. Major -A Gothic Suspense Review

A slow-burn gothic horror that settles into your bones and stays there.

C.D. Major’s The Residency is a slow-burn gothic suspense novel that does something rare — it makes the familiar feel deeply, fundamentally wrong. Set on a remote Scottish island, this atmospheric horror story follows Ginny, a single mother who accepts an artist’s residency that turns out to be something far darker than she could have imagined.

With its creeping dread, uncanny paintings, and an island community that knows more than it says, The Residency is a standout addition to contemporary gothic fiction. If you’re looking for Scottish island horror that builds tension like a tightening grip, this is the book.

The Residency by C.D. Major -A Gothic Suspense Review

The Residency | C.D. Major | Canelo | 6th August 2026 |

Ginny has her daughter beside her, her art supplies, her desperate hope that this residency might be the thing that saves them both. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. Don’t go. Don’t trust this. But of course, she goes. Of course, she trusts. And that’s where the trouble starts.

The Residency is gothic suspense in the classic mould, a slow, deliberate accumulation of wrongness that builds until the air itself feels thick with something that might be dread or might be the breath of whatever lives in the walls.

Major understands that the most effective horror isn’t the thing that jumps out at you. It’s the whisper you’re not sure you heard. It’s the painting you could swear was looking at you differently than it did yesterday. It’s the contract clause that seems odd but not quite alarming enough to walk away from. The atmosphere creeps rather than rushes, and I found myself reading with a kind of uneasy vigilance, scanning each sentence for the next small wrongness.

The pacing is deliberate; some readers might call it slow, but I’d call it patient. It trusts you to feel the unease without having it spelled out. The chapters have a momentum that carries you forward even as the story seems to be tightening its grip, and there’s a rhythm to the dread that feels almost musical.

A long passage of tense domestic detail, then a short punch of something uncanny. A moment of relief, then another layer of pressure. By the time Ginny realises the full scope of what she’s walked into, you’ve been marinating in that atmosphere for so long that it feels like your own skin is starting to prickle.

There’s humour here too, of the dark and wry variety, the kind that comes from a woman who knows she’s made a terrible decision but has to keep functioning anyway. Ginny’s internal voice has a sharpness to it, a survival instinct that manifests as sarcasm when things get too strange. It’s the sort of humour that makes the horror worse, because it reminds you she’s a real person with a real life and a real daughter, not just a horror movie protagonist waiting for her cue to scream.

Major’s prose does something interesting. It’s clean, unfussy, almost deceptively simple on the sentence level. She doesn’t reach for elaborate metaphors or baroque description. Instead, she builds her effects through accumulation small, precise details that layer on top of each other until the whole thing is weighted down with unease. A dropped word here, a half-heard whisper there, a character who won’t quite meet Ginny’s eyes. The sentences themselves are mostly straightforward, but they carry a charge because of what they don’t say as much as what they do.

The dual timeline structure serves the story beautifully. It allows the history of the house and its occupants to bleed into the present, giving the supernatural elements a grounded, almost historical weight. The past isn’t just backstory; it’s active, pressing against the present like something trying to get in. And the way Major weaves the two timelines together, letting information drip out at exactly the right moments, shows a real command of suspense mechanics. She knows when to give you a piece of the puzzle and when to withhold it, and that instinct is what makes the book so hard to put down.

Dialogue is spare but effective. The islanders speak in clipped, evasive sentences that tell you everything you need to know about their complicity. Ginny’s exchanges with her daughter have a tenderness that makes the stakes feel desperately real. And the benefactor the man who owns the house, who remains mostly offpage is rendered through absence, through what people won’t say about him, which is far creepier than any direct description could be.

Beneath the ghost story, beneath the gothic trappings and the creepy paintings and the whispers in the dark, The Residency is about something very real and very urgent. It’s about what it means to be a woman with no safety net. Ginny isn’t just scared of the supernatural thing in the house.

She’s scared of the exhusband getting out of prison, of not being able to feed her daughter, of the slow erosion of hope that comes from scraping by in a city that doesn’t care if you sink. The residency isn’t just an opportunity; it’s a lifeline. And that’s what makes her choices so agonising, she doesn’t have the luxury of saying no to something that feels wrong, because the alternative might be worse.

This is where the book earns its critical weight. Major is writing about precarity, economic, emotional, social, and how it makes us vulnerable to things we wouldn’t otherwise tolerate. Ginny ignores red flags because she can’t afford to see them. She rationalises, she minimises, she tells herself it’s fine because the alternative is going back to London with nothing. And that’s a horror that exists in the real world, every day, for millions of women. The supernatural element is a metaphor, sure, but it’s also a literalisation of that feeling, the sense that something is closing in, that you’ve made a mistake you can’t undo, that the system was never designed to protect you.

There’s also a rich vein of commentary here about art and who gets to make it. Ginny was a promising artist once, with a future that got derailed by circumstances, a child, a lack of money, an abusive partner. The residency offers her a chance to be that person again, to reclaim a version of herself that got lost. And the house, with its strange gallery and its changing paintings, becomes a twisted reflection of that desire, the hunger to create, to leave a mark, that can curdle into something darker when it’s denied for too long.

The folk horror elements, the insular community, the sense of ancient secrets, the way the landscape itself seems to participate in the story’s malevolence, speak to something about the British psyche, too. The remote island is a place where the rules of the mainland don’t apply, where old things are allowed to fester, where outsiders are viewed with suspicion and sometimes worse. It’s a Gothic tradition that goes back to the Brontës and beyond, and Major updates it with a contemporary sensitivity that makes it feel urgent rather than antiquarian.

If you’ve read Major’s previous work, The Residency feels like both a culmination and a departure. Her earlier books The Silent Hours, The Other Girl, The Last Night established her as a writer of historical fiction with a gothic sensibility, always interested in women trapped by circumstances beyond their control, always drawn to isolated settings and family secrets. The Other Girl, set in a 1940s New Zealand asylum, has that claustrophobic quality that runs through all her work the sense of walls closing in, of institutions that are supposed to help but actually imprison.

The Residency takes that sensibility and pushes it into outright horror territory. Her previous books were suspenseful, certainly, and had their share of darkness, but this one commits more fully to the supernatural, to the genuinely uncanny. The paintings that change, the whispers, the sense of something ancient and hungry in the house these aren’t just atmospheric touches. They’re the engine of the plot. And Major handles the transition from historical suspense to gothic horror with real confidence, as if she’s been building towards this all along.

What’s consistent across her bibliography is her interest in dual timelines, in how the past presses against the present. The Silent Hours had its wartime and postwar threads; The Last Night had its 1950s storyline; The Other Girl had its asylum history. In The Residency, that structural habit becomes something more than a technique it becomes thematic. The house’s past is literally reaching into the present, and Ginny can’t escape it any more than she can escape her own history. Major is saying something here about the persistence of trauma, about how the things that happened before we arrived are still happening, still shaping the walls we live inside.

Her craft has evolved too. The prose in The Residency is more controlled, more economical than in her earlier work. She’s learned to trust the reader more, to let atmosphere do the work that description used to do. And her pacing is sharper the slowburn quality is intentional, a tool rather than a default. This is a writer who has grown into her voice and her genre, and the result is her most confident, most unsettling book yet.

It’s gothic, yes, but it’s not retrograde. It uses the classic furniture of the genre the isolated house, the strange benefactor, the forbidden room, the paintings that seem to watch you but it doesn’t treat them as nostalgia. It takes them seriously, updates them with contemporary psychological insight, and makes them feel new again.

There’s a folk horror edge to it, too, in the way the island community operates. The locals know something. They won’t tell Ginny what it is. Their politeness is a kind of violence, a refusal to warn her that feels almost as sinister as the thing they’re not warning her about. This is a book that understands the horror of community complicity, the way that a whole group of people can decide, collectively, to let something bad happen to an outsider because it’s easier than intervening.

In terms of its natural genre neighbours, I’d place it alongside Laura Purcell’s The Silent Companions both books use inanimate objects (paintings, wooden figures) as conduits for the supernatural, and both have that slowburn Gothic quality that builds to something genuinely chilling. There’s also something of Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger in its psychological ambiguity, though The Residency is more explicitly supernatural. And for readers who loved the atmosphere of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, the sense of a landscape that is itself malevolent, this will feel like familiar territory made strange again.

The Gothic has always been about the return of the repressed, and Major understands that what we repress in the twentyfirst century is as terrifying as anything the Victorians dreamed up. The house might be old, but the fears it represents are brand new.

A gothic that honours its roots while speaking directly to the anxieties of the present moment. Major is part of a wave of writers who are taking the furniture of classic horror and filling it with modern concerns, and the result is a genre that feels vital, urgent, and genuinely scary.

The paintings in that gallery accumulate, layer upon layer of watching, of waiting, of something that was never quite human learning to look like us. Ginny sees it eventually. And by the time you close this book, you might find yourself glancing at the pictures on your own walls with a new, uncomfortable awareness. That’s the gift of a book that knows what it’s doing. That’s the residue of a story that stays with you.

The Residency by C.D. Major

Life in London is hard for Ginny as a single mother barely scraping by. Once she was a promising artist with a glittering future ahead. On a whim, she applies for an artist’s residency – all expenses paid – and is astonished to be accepted.
Soon, Ginny is on a boat to a remote Scottish island, her daughter by her side. But was she too hasty, attracted by the promise of security and a chance to make art again?

Locals she meets are tightlipped about the man who is Ginny’s benefactor, but she senses underlying fear. Her contract contains odd rules about avoiding the gallery at the vast property where she is living, and there is an undeniable eeriness to the place. If she didn’t know better, she’d swear she could hear whispers, and that the people in the paintings were changing overnight…

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