The Small Hand

Susan Hill
Profile Books

Returning home from a client visit late one evening, Adam Snow takes a wrong turn and stumbles across the derelict old White House. Compelled by curiosity he decides to enter, only to be repelled when he feels the unmistakable sensation of a small hand creeping onto his own. This is just the beginning of a series of odd experiences.

This is the third of these lovely little pocket books of Hills that I've read and again it's a solid, if uninspiring, read.

Hill has a very easy style, she constructs her stories with a measured and stealthy pace filled with incidentals and asides that coach you along and draw you into the mundane as the extraordinary builds around you. Her menace, here is the impression of a young child's hand holding that of our protagonist, is subtle and both moving and disquieting and the intensity of the experience builds in a claustrophobic swirl until...well...until it all peters out and you're left wondering if that's all there is.

It isn't, quite, there is a coda to the story that attempts to give the whole thing a tragic 'Woman in Black' style ending but by then it's too late as any feelings of trepidation and discomfort have fallen away and you're merely reading to the end.

Buy it here - The Small Hand (The Susan Hill Collection)

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The Travelling Bag & Other Ghostly Stories

Susan Hill
Profile Books

From the foggy streets of Victorian London to the eerie perfection of 1950s suburbia, the everyday is invaded by the evil otherworldly in this unforgettable collection of new ghost stories from the author of The Woman in Black.
In the title story, on a murky evening in a warmly lit club off St James, a bishop listens closely as a paranormal detective recounts his most memorable case, one whose horrifying denouement took place in that very building.
In 'The Front Room', a devoutly Christian mother tries to protect her children from the evil influence of their grandmother, both when she is alive and when she is dead.
A lonely boy finds a friend in 'Boy Number 21', but years later he is forced to question the nature of that friendship, and to ask whether ghosts can perish in fires.
This is Susan Hill at her best, telling characteristically flesh-creeping and startling tales of thwarted ambition, terrifying revenge and supernatural stirrings that will leave readers wide-awake long into the night.

This lovely looking little collection came into my hands only recently but the inclusion of an occult / psychic detective story will always help a book to leap frog it's way up the reading pile.  As it happens that one was probably the least satisfying story of the four.

Opening the collection is the title piece with it's psychic investigator or as I'm going to think of him a 'psychic noticer' because he does little investigating in what is a fairly rudimentary sort of revenge tale with a nice ending but the framing device about the detective is a little pointless.

The second story is kinda lovely but feels entirely underdeveloped as we, perhaps, get to meet 'Boy Twenty One' in a jumble of comings and goings.

The longest story here, 'Alice Baker', again seems slightly lacking in development as a new worker joins a close knit team of office workers.  There's much to like and Hill builds the atmosphere beautifully but the crisis point is confusing (the sudden and rather pointless appearance of the child) and the newspaper revelation ending was just piffle.

The book ends with it's most successful story as a well meaning couple invite his malicious stepmother to live in 'The Front Room' only for things to go bad fast.  It reminded me of some of Joan Aiken's creepier moments as the children feel the full force of her malice.

A mixed reception then for the 4 stories most of which could have benefited from a strong editorial hand but equally none of them stay around long enough to bore - indeed I'd have liked the second story to have stayed longer - and the book itself was a nice accompaniment to a quiet evening with a glass of something tasty.

Buy it here -  The Travelling Bag: And Other Ghostly Stories

The Woman In Black

Susan Hill
Vintage

Proud and solitary, Eel Marsh House surveys the windswept reaches of the salt marshes beyond Nine Lives Causeway. Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor, is summoned to attend the funeral of Mrs Alice Drablow, the house's sole inhabitant, unaware of the tragic secrets which lie hidden behind the shuttered windows. It is not until he glimpses a pale young woman, dressed all in black, at the funeral, that a creeping sense of unease begins to take hold, a feeling deepened by the reluctance of the locals to talk of the woman in black - and her terrible purpose.

I've avoided the Harry Potter version of this like the plague but the Nigel Kneale adaptation was particularly good so I was pretty intrigued to read the book at some point and so when I finally came across a copy I dived in.

As a pastiche of the ghost books of old it is absolutely spot on and Hill has nailed both the voice and the vibe.  There is a little wobble in that at times it's quite difficult to pin down exactly when the various parts of the story are set - at one point Arthur (Kipps, our narrator) makes an allusion to something being like a Victorian melodrama  (or some such, I stupidly forgot to make a note of the page) which is when I thought it was meant to be set so I revised forward to early Edwardian and in the opening sequence to possibly pre-WWII.

But anyway,  it's pastiche credentials notwithstanding the book has to stand on it's own account and it absolutely does.  Hill has created a genuinely creepy and disquieting tale wherein the Black Lady's presence and the spectral goings-on on the marsh are palpably upsetting.  Kipps is a sympathetically human character that we first meet as a gentle if somewhat melancholy character before we get to view the terrible events that turn the ambitious and slightly starchy younger version into the man we meet at the outset.

The supporting cast are, for the most part, fairly sketchily drawn which is unsurprising in a novella but Hill uses a lovely light touch to give them anima such as Tomes the clerk with his constant sniffing.

The books conclusion is both inevitable and horrible and drenched with vindictive and pointless malice leaving the reader drained and as bereft as our protagonist.

Buy it here -  The Woman In Black

The Man in the Picture

Susan Hill
Profile Books

An extraordinary ghost story from a modern master, published just in time for Halloween. In the apartment of Oliver's old professor at Cambridge, there is a painting on the wall, a mysterious depiction of masked revellers at the Venice carnival. On this cold winter's night, the old professor has decided to reveal the painting's eerie secret. The dark art of the Venetian scene, instead of imitating life, has the power to entrap it. To stare into the painting is to play dangerously with the unseen demons it hides, and become the victim of its macabre beauty.
By the renowned storyteller Susan Hill--whose first ghost story, The Woman in Black, has run for eighteen years as a play in London's West End--here is a new take on a form that is fully classical and, in Hill's able hands, newly vital. The Man in the Picture is a haunting tale of loss, love, and the very basest fear of our beings.

Although this book is subtitled 'A Ghost Story' I can't help feeling that to be a bit of a misnomer.  There're no ghosts in it,  plenty of haunted people and a darkly delicious core idea but not really any actual ghosts.

This novella tells a story within a story that's framed, at the very last inside two other stories all concerning the same painting of Venice and the people depicted within. An elderly Cambridge professor tells a visiting ex-student of his acquisition of the painting and the events that surround him gaining a deeper understanding of it's history and the tale surrounding it.

In the classic way of things much of what happens does so through the telling of tales around a fire with a glass of liquor to hand and a cosiness that offsets the mounting unease.  The professor's story at the heart of the tale shares this with it's country house setting but suffers from a marked similarity to Wilkie Collins' 'The Haunted Hotel'.  The outermost layer of the story is likewise flawed but also in it's rather heavy handed attempt to provide a 'shock' ending that can be seen coming long before it lands.

If I sound overly negative then please understand that there is much to like here.  Hill is a writer with an eminently readable style and she's obviously and utterly au fait with those writers of the macabre, the unsettling and the weird that she is channelling here and with only 145 pages it provided me with a pleasantly macabre early Sunday morning read alongside some mellow music and a cafetiere full of my favourite coffee.

Buy it here -  The Man in the Picture: A Ghost Story (The Susan Hill Collection)

The Woman in Black (1989)

  

Produced for ITV and broadcast on Christmas Eve 1989 this version of Susan Hill's novel was adapted for the screen by Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale.

The story tells of a junior solicitor, Arthur Kidd, and his journey to the town of Crythin Gifford in order to attend the funeral of local reclusive widow, Mrs. Drablow.  Once there he finds a village fearful of both her isolated home, Eel Marsh House, and of a mysterious black clad woman who Kidd keeps catching sight of.

Soon Kidd's duties necessitate his taking up residence in Eel Marsh where he discovers that the house's evil reputation is well deserved.

Director Herbert Wise has conjured a restrained and in many ways a somewhat old fashioned air of menace that he maintains throughout.  In this he is ably aided by both the script and some fine performances from his cast including Adrian Rawlins as Kidd (who would later play James (father of Harry) Potter), (Colditz Kommandant) Bernard Hepton as local bigwig Sam Toovey, Brit TV stalwart David Daker as pub landlord Josiah Freston and Pauline Moran (Poirot's Miss Lemon) as the titular Woman.

As I understand it this is, with some small changes, a mostly faithful adaptation of the novel and shows an admirable mastery of the form by Hill, Kneale and Wise who have produced a low key and deliciously eerie film that finds terror in disembodied sounds, the laughter of children, the superstition of villagers and the presence of an enigmatic figure.  It's a form of horror rarely seen these days outside of the BBCs Christmas ghost story adaptations of James' (and others) works and with it's Christmas Eve scheduling one can't help but think this was intended as a direct challenge to that series and a successful one at that.

I've not read the book or seen the more recent movie (starring Daniel Radcliffe) but I must admit I'm intrigued to do so in the case of the former, less so the latter, as what we have here is an adaptation that shows a story very much in the vein of M.R. James and the classic Victorian and Edwardian ghost story writers. 

(edit - since writing this I have indeed read the book.  My write up can be found here)

As a fan of both Kneale and of stories written and/or set in that era I have been long intrigued by this one and was very happy to discover that it was eminently watchable, downright spooky and a complete delight. 

Buy it here - UK / US .



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