Susan Hill wrote The Woman in Black in 1983 as a deliberate exercise in an obsolete form, and it became the second-longest-running non-musical play in West End history.
That’s the useful fact about her, because it explains what she’s doing. She is a literary novelist with a long career, a Whitbread and a Booker shortlisting, who periodically writes ghost stories in the Edwardian manner on purpose, using the machinery M. R. James and the Victorians left behind, without irony and without updating it.
The bet is that the old machinery still works, and The Woman in Black proved it comprehensively. Everything since has been a variation on the same experiment, with variable results.
One thing to know before you start. The Susan Hill books run to a great deal, in several modes, and the ghost stories are a small fraction of them. She also writes a long-running crime series and a body of literary fiction that has nothing to do with any of this. This guide covers the horror.
I haven’t read these. What follows is the critical consensus.
Fiction by René Rehn
The Short Version
Read The Woman in Black. It’s the reason she’s on a horror site, it’s about a hundred and sixty pages, and it works completely.
Then The Small Hand or Dolly if you want more of the same at similar length, and know they are considerably slighter.
The Essential
The Woman in Black (1983)
A young solicitor named Arthur Kipps travels north to a recluse’s estate, a house cut off by a tidal causeway, to put her affairs in order. At the funeral, standing apart from the mourners, a wasted figure in black. Nobody local will say her name.
It’s an exercise in the classical form, and it’s entirely unashamed about that. The isolated house, the marsh fret, the causeway that floods, the sound heard across the water, the dog, the locked room. Nothing in it is new and every piece is executed properly.
The reason it works where imitations don’t is the withholding. Hill shows you almost nothing. The woman is glimpsed, at a distance, four or five times in the whole book, and the horror arrives through sound and through what people won’t say.
The ending is nastier than the stage version’s, which is worth knowing if you’ve seen the play. The play softens it. The novel does not, and its final page is a genuinely cruel piece of construction.
The 1989 television adaptation is the frightening one. The 2012 film with Daniel Radcliffe is the famous one and is much less effective.
Also on ghost books and ghost stories.
The Other Ghost Stories
She returned to the form repeatedly across thirty years and the later Susan Hill books are all novellas, all Edwardian or Victorian in setting, and all built on the same frame.
There are five or six more Susan Hill books in the ghost story mode, all short, all in the same register, and nobody seriously argues that any of them reaches the first.
The Man in the Picture (2007)
A Cambridge don shows a former student a Venetian carnival scene hanging in his rooms and tells him where it came from.
The painting is crowded with masked figures on a canal, and one of them at the back appears to be being pulled into a gondola against his will. The don acquired it at auction. The woman who sold it had a reason for wanting it gone.
The structure is nested. A story inside a story inside a story, each teller passing it to the next, which is the Christmas ghost story convention and Hill uses it deliberately.
What is happening in the picture is that it collects people, and the count of figures is not fixed.
It runs to about a hundred pages, and the Venice sections are the strongest.
Of the later novellas, this one usually gets ranked first, with the caveat that the ending arrives too quickly.
The Small Hand (2010)
Adam Snow is an antiquarian bookseller who takes a wrong turn driving back from a client and finds an abandoned house with an overgrown garden.
Standing at the gate, he feels a small hand take his.
It isn’t frightening at first. It’s companionable, and Adam isn’t alarmed, and he goes back. Then it returns elsewhere, and it is stronger, and it starts pulling.
What Hill is doing is the classic English form with the machinery entirely intact: the isolated house, the bookseller’s commission, a monastery in France, and a family history that explains it.
Adam’s brother and what happened to him as a child is the disclosure.
It’s generally counted the slightest of her novellas, and the first appearance of the hand is one of the best single images in her work.
Around ninety pages.
Dolly (2012)
Two cousins, Edward and Leonora, are sent to stay with an aunt at a remote house in the Fens for a summer when they are children.
Leonora is eight, spoiled, and demands a particular doll for her birthday. She is given the wrong one, and she throws it against the wall and breaks its head, and it is put away.
Thirty years later Edward inherits the house and finds the doll.
The Fens are the reason it works. Hill writes flat empty country, water everywhere, and a house with nothing near it, and the atmosphere carries a plot that is thinner than her others.
The doll itself is genuinely unpleasant, and what has happened to it in the intervening decades is the best moment in the book.
Readers tend to call it the nastiest of the novellas, and to find Leonora as an adult underwritten.
It is the one that frightens people most.
Printer’s Devil Court (2013) and The Traveling Bag (2016)
The late short work, and the point at which the formula is visibly tiring.
Printer’s Devil Court is a young doctor in Edwardian London who falls in with two colleagues conducting experiments on the recently dead in a house off Fleet Street, attempting to reverse the process. It runs to about sixty pages and the premise is better than the execution.
The Traveling Bag is a collection of four novellas, and the title story is the best of them. A Victorian scientific rivalry, a stolen idea, and a bag in an attic with something moving inside it that Hill describes only by sound.
The general reading of the late ghost stories is that she was working a formula she’d established forty years earlier, and that the Edwardian pastiche had become automatic.
Read The Woman in Black and one other and stop, and the one other should be Dolly.
Outside the Horror
The ghost stories are a small part of a sixty-year career and she is a considerably more serious novelist than a horror site suggests.
I’m the King of the Castle (1970) won the Somerset Maugham Award and is about two boys in a large house, one of whom systematically destroys the other, and it is more genuinely disturbing than any of the ghost stories. There is nothing supernatural in it.
Strange Meeting (1971) is a First World War novel about two officers.
In the Springtime of the Year (1974) was written after her fiancé died suddenly and is about a young widow.
The Simon Serrailler crime series runs to eleven books and is her commercial mainstay.
She was made a Dame in 2020, ran her own publishing imprint, and has been a Booker judge.
I’m the King of the Castle is the one to read if the novellas have worked on you.
Where to Start
Read The Woman in Black, in one sitting if you can, and preferably not at night if you’re susceptible, because it is doing exactly what it set out to do.
If you want more of the same, read Dolly or The Man in the Picture, and adjust your expectations downward.
And if you want the genuinely disturbing Susan Hill book that nobody files under horror, read I’m the King of the Castle.
Everything else worth reading is on my best horror books list. The Woman in Black is the modern entry on my ghost stories list.
