The Woman in Black: A Ghost Story

Anyone who enjoys a classic haunted house/ghost story tale in the old British tradition will love Susan Hill's, "The Woman In Black".

This story is all about atmosphere and not things jumping out at you or gory kill scenes. A young attorney is sent to a remote town in Northern England to go through the house of a recently deceased old woman who had been a long-time client of his law firm. Upon arriving in the town he finds that no one wants to talk about the Eel Marsh House or the late Mrs. Drablow. He can't even find anyone willing to assist him in going through the house in search of any legal paperwork. He soon finds out why as he is haunted by a strange locked nursery, the screams of a child sinking into the marsh behind the house and mysterious appearances by a sallow-faced woman clad only in black.

A perfect tale for a fireside Halloween ghost story session!

It is not often I am moved to compare a writer to the great Shirley Jackson but here it is. Susan Hill's The Woman In Black is deep, dark and very scary. There is not a body part or axe wielding maniac in sight, just menace and atmosphere. This book can stand with The Haunting of Hill House and that is saying something. Be sure to also read Susan Hill's The Man In The Picture. Trust me, you will devour it as i did (I never trust people who say "trust me").

The back cover of this short novel says: "What real reader does not yearn, somewhere in the recess of his or her heart, for a really literate, first-class thriller--one that chills the body, but warms the soul with plot, perception, and language at once astute and vivid? In other words, a ghost story written by Jane Austen?" How can you resist a hook like that?

I first read The Woman in Black in 2002 after seeing the play of the same name in London's West End. The story features a young solicitor named Arthur Kipps who's dispatched to the north of England to settle the affairs of the recently-deceased Mrs. Drablow, an elderly woman who lived at the remote Eel Marsh House.

The Woman in Black is a ghost story with all the requisite elements: a strange woman dressed in black, a locked room with a rocking chair that won't stop moving; and the eerie sound of a pony and trap in the fog. It's one of the creepiest books I've read in a long time--Company of Liars may be the exception. There's no blood here, just a spine-tingling yet subtle mystery. There's really nothing more I can say; this book is perfect.

The novel is narrated by a character named Arthur Kipps, now an elderly man, who recounts the eerie events that occurred decades earlier when he was a solicitor settling the estate of Alice Drablow.

As a young man, he was sent to a small town to attend Mrs Drablow's funeral and sort through the widow's papers. Although it was an ordinary task, Kipps' life was permanently altered by the appearances of a woman in black, the mystery he uncovered, and the strange occurrences in Eel Marsh House--Mrs Drablow's large home, surrounded by marsh and cut off from the mainland during high tides.

Author Susan Hill does a superb job of creating that foggy, damp atmosphere that's ideal for old-fashioned ghost stories. I saw the play which is based upon the novel when I was in England last year and actually jumped out of my seat a couple times. I went out to buy the book before the plane ride home. The book isn't scary in that same jump-out-of-your-seat-and-scream (as the group of school children in the audience did frequently) sense, but that's not to say that it's boring. If you enjoy subtly creepy stories, you'll devour this book.

Susan Hill's 1983 novella has been so successful as to have been made into a television movie and a long-running play, but it works best in its original form as a perfectly-sized long story about a solicitor trying to learn the truth about a specter associated with an abandoned manor house on the flat moor country of East Anglia. The tale is set during the Edwardian period (the heyday of the English ghost story) and comes with all the appurtenances one would expect of a great English ghost story: a frame narrative, a mysterious haunting figure, an uncomprehending narrator invested in scientific positivist explanations for everything, terrified townsfolk who refuse to explain anything to the protagonist (unfortunately, no good explanation of this is ever given: couldn't they have just told him the back story?), and above all tremendous atmosphere. The current edition of the book, from David R. Godine, is beautiful, but perhaps exorbitantly priced for a novella--though the discount amazon provides helps matters greatly.