The Woman in Black

Nothing brings excitement about a book more than a film adaptation (except perhaps the death of an author), and Daniel Radcliffe is currently showcasing his acting talent in cinemas around the world in the big-screen version of The Woman in Black. From seeing trailers and hearing feedback from film-goers, the movie seems to be terrifying. I cannot watch a film without having read the book, so I began Susan Hill’s 1983 novel with high hopes.

Hill’s novel is a good old-fashioned ghost story set in a secluded English town, with a first-person narrative. Arthur Kipps is a young solicitor sent to the funeral of Alice Drablow, an elderly woman who lived in the isolated Eel Marsh House. When he gets to the house to do business, he is haunted by the ghost of a young woman who appears to be wasting away. Over the course of several nights, Kipps faces the terrifying battle between the unexplained noises and his own tortured mind.

 It is with Kipps’ narrative that Hill’s incredible craft first appears. Arthur Kipps is not an unreliable narrator. Indeed, after explaining how he felt after seeing the eponymous woman in black disappear suddenly from a graveyard, he says, “I did not believe in ghosts. Or rather, until that day, I had not done so, and whatever stories I had heard of them I had, like most rational, sensible young men, dismissed as nothing more than stories indeed”. The effect that this has is for the reader to realise that Kipps is not a man prone to making claims of being haunted often. In fact, he is a very rational man. Therefore, his story has to be taken at face value. Ghost stories will always more frightening if there is an essence of truth behind them.

For reasons such as this, The Woman in Black actually is a frightening novel. Not since James Herbert’s underrated The Secret of Crickley Hall (2006), have I read a book and felt nervous when I heard a creak in the house, or imagined footsteps behind me. The novel certainly picks at human fears and scratches away at them, until the reader is ragged with nervous energy; a massive advantage for a horror story.

Everything about The Woman in Black is eerie. From the names of the places (“Nine Lives Causeway, and Eel Marsh”), to the long descriptions of the weather, Hill creates something not quite normal, and it is this that grates at the reader most. Everything seems unusual, but it takes place in a world so real that the sense of the uncanny is strong. The way in which Hill makes her work chilling without actually revealing any hideous monstrosities further increases the novel’s cleverness. Hill resists the temptation of including severed heads or pools of blood, and the reader benefits from this. The horrors are left to their imaginations, which makes the fear internal. The effects of the book therefore linger for a greater period of time.

The Woman in Black preys on everything that is frightening; the dark, the unknown, things that go bump in the night…