The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

September 21, 201312 Comments

The Woman in Black begins on Christmas Eve, when Arthur Kipps’ family gather round the fire to tell ghost stories. To the surprise and disappointment of his wife and stepchildren, Arthur refuses to join in and leaves the room, not wanting to explain that the only ghost story he knows is a true story that’s too terrifying to be told. Standing outside in the cold, Arthur decides to write his story down instead. The rest of the novel consists of Arthur’s account of something that happened to him many years earlier.

As a young lawyer, Arthur was sent to attend the funeral of a client, Mrs Alice Drablow, in the town of Crythin Gifford. Before her death, the elderly Mrs Drablow lived alone in lonely Eel Marsh House, which can only be reached from the mainland by the Nine Lives Causeway which becomes flooded at high tide. At the funeral Arthur sees a woman dressed in black but when he tries to find out who she is he discovers that nobody will answer his questions. Arthur’s work takes him to Eel Marsh House where he decides to stay for a few days sorting through Mrs Drablow’s papers – and alone in the isolated house, cut off by the tide from the rest of Crythin Gifford, Arthur has a series of encounters with the mysterious woman in black, each one more frightening than the one before.

The Woman in Black is a book I’ve wanted to read for a long time. I put it on my list for the RIP challenge last year but didn’t have time for it, so added it again to this year’s list, determined to read it this time. I’m glad I’ve read it at last and I did enjoy it, but I didn’t love it as much as I hoped to. I didn’t find the book as scary as I thought it would be either. There were a few scenes that sent a shiver down my spine, but it wasn’t quite the terrifying story I’d been expecting. I wonder whether the fact that I had to read the book in two sittings with a break in the middle made it have less impact; my advice to anyone else reading this book for the first time is to make sure you give yourself enough time to read it in one sitting if possible (it’s only a short book so it would be quite manageable).

Although this book didn’t really succeed in scaring me, it does still have everything you would expect from a traditional ghost story: there’s a creepy old house in a remote and lonely setting, lots of bad weather including storms and thick fog, a sense of mystery created by the villagers’ reluctance to talk to Arthur or to go anywhere near Eel Marsh House, and of course the ghostly manifestations of the woman in black herself. I am starting to get impatient with characters who insist on staying in houses that they know are haunted, though – Kate in Midnight is a Lonely Place which I read recently was exactly the same. I know it would spoil the story if they ran away at the first sign of trouble but I think I would have more sympathy if they weren’t voluntarily choosing to spend the night in a haunted house!

There’s not really much more I can say about this book without starting to give too much away. It’s written in a Victorian style, which I loved, but I kept wondering when the story was supposed to be set. It was obviously not the Victorian period as there were mentions of cars and electric lights, so I’m assuming it was set in the early decades of the twentieth century. I loved Spider the dog – she was my favourite character! And I thought the ending of the book worked perfectly – it wasn’t entirely unexpected but I was still shocked by it!

The Beacon by Susan Hill

December 14, 2012December 14, 201213 Comments

Until I read The Beacon last weekend, the only Susan Hill book I had read was one of her ghost stories, The Small Hand, which, for me, was probably not the best introduction to her work. I loved the atmosphere she created but I didn’t find it very original and was disappointed by it. The Beacon is a very different type of book. It’s not a ghost story – I would describe it as a family drama – but it’s still very dark and haunting and I enjoyed it much more than The Small Hand, so I wish I had started with this one instead.

The Beacon is the name of the Prime family’s farmhouse, located somewhere in the north of England. A dark, lonely path leads from the village up to The Beacon, high on a hill, and in stormy weather the house is battered by howling winds. May Prime, now fifty years old, has lived here for her entire life, apart from one year when she went away to university in London. May has never married and since her father’s death has been caring for her elderly mother, Bertha. When Bertha dies too, May is left alone to reflect on her own life and the lives of her brother, Colin, and sister, Berenice. There’s another brother too – his name is Frank – but May has not seen him for many years, since he betrayed his family and destroyed their childhood memories. Now that both of their parents are dead, will May and her siblings ever be able to forgive Frank for what he has done?

The Beacon is a short novella and can easily be read in an hour or two, but despite only being 160 pages long it’s a very powerful story. At first it appears to be just a simple tale of a farmer’s daughter, her family and friends and her experiences of university, but it soon becomes infused with a sense of mystery and suspense. From the beginning May gives us hints that her brother Frank has done something terrible – so bad that May and her other siblings don’t even want to tell him about their mother’s death – but we have to wait until halfway through the story before we find out exactly what it was that alienated him from the rest of the family. I wish I could tell you what he did, but the revelation is the pivotal point of the story and may not be as effective if you know what it is in advance!

As with The Small Hand, my favourite thing about this book was the atmosphere. It’s so bleak and unsettling, and there’s a real feeling of isolation, claustrophobia and loneliness. I thought the portrayal of May’s mental state and the terrors she experienced while trying to start a new life in London was particularly well done, as were her earlier memories of the joy she felt as a child learning to read and write. There’s less focus on the lives of Colin and Berenice, but Frank comes to the forefront of the story in the second half of the book and we learn more about his character and what may have caused him to behave the way he did.

Although The Beacon is one of those books where ‘nothing really happens’, I still found it surprisingly gripping. The ending is very ambiguous and made me question everything I had just read and wonder what was true and what wasn’t. It could be interpreted in several different ways and I was left with plenty to think about even after finishing the final sentence.

The Small Hand by Susan Hill

September 2, 20114 Comments

I read this book a few weeks ago so I can’t count it as one of my books for the R.I.P Challenge. However, I noticed that a lot of people were planning to read a Susan Hill book for RIP, so this seems like a good time to post my thoughts on The Small Hand.

It’s a short book and I would recommend reading it in as few sittings as possible to get the maximum impact from the story. The book is beautifully written, although if you’re expecting something very chilling and scary I think you might be disappointed because I would describe it as an eerie, unsettling read rather than a frightening one.

Our narrator is Adam Snow, an antiquarian book dealer. Driving home to London one day after visiting a client, he takes a wrong turning and decides to ask for directions. Heading for the nearest house, Adam finds himself in an overgrown garden. Seeing that the house itself appears derelict and deserted, he starts to walk back to the car and it’s here that he has the first in a series of supernatural experiences when he feels a child’s small hand gripping his own. As time goes by Adam is visited by the small hand on several more occasions and becomes aware of a ghostly presence that seems determined to lead him into danger. But who does the hand belong to and what does its owner want?

As far as ghost stories go, I didn’t think this one was particularly original. Even though I don’t read a lot of this type of book anymore, I still found it easy to predict what was going to happen. The best thing about this book is the atmosphere Susan Hill creates. The story has a timeless feel and apart from the occasional cultural references that tell us it’s taking place in the present day, it could just as easily have been set a hundred years ago. The descriptions of the various settings, such as the neglected house and garden or the lonely French monastery, are wonderful too. I loved the world Susan Hill created, but I think the plot was too thin to make this a very satisfying read for me. Or it could just be that I read it at the wrong time of year – summer is not the best time to read ghost stories and this is definitely a book to curl up with on a dark night.