The House of Silence : Domestic Thriller

“The most devastating horror doesn’t scream: it whispers.”With that premise, Andrés Rodríguez Fuentes builds a short novel in The House of Silence that shifts between psychological thriller, domestic drama, and metaphysical horror. What starts as a family self-control experiment slowly turns into a ruthless dissection of emotional repression and its darkest consequences.The result is a dense, restrained, precise, and deeply unsettling work.The silence as a monsterThe premise is as simple as it is powerful: a family decides to go a year without arguing. But what seems like a bid for harmony quickly morphs into self-inflicted torture, a pact with the darkness. The house, which at first serves as the stage for some kind of family therapy, becomes a living organism that soaks up the noise, tension, and repressed thoughts of its inhabitants—only to spit them back out, materialized as bluish lights and inner voices.That’s where the novel’s originality lies: the horror doesn’t come from the supernatural, but from the buildup of silence, from denying the word. The author turns the everyday into a nightmare, like Shirley Jackson or Mariana Enríquez might, but without copying either. His style—restrained and dry—works like a scalpel: it cuts without drama, slices without trembling.Structure and rhythmDivided into six chapters and an epilogue, the narrative builds with an escalating rhythm that moves from psychological drama to an allegory of the repressed. Each chapter is another step in the degradation of the home and the mind: first discomfort, then fear, then fracture. There are no cheap jumpscares or narrative tricks. Everything progresses with an internal logic that keeps the reader in mounting tension, no blood or shocks required.The horror here is gradual, almost scientific. As if the author’s running a social experiment and just observing the results. What’s chilling isn’t that weird things happen: it’s how much we get why they do.María Fernández RedondoPlaya de San Juan, 2025