This short, short novel is typical Susan Hill. It starts with an atmospheric, classic ghost story and then ends up slamming you in the gut. ( )

Dude goes to the length of living in a monastery for some time just because some child holds his hand.
Talk about fear of commitment.



*

Joking aside, it was a pretty neat modern ghost story, with all the victorian vibes and Hill's tropes of faded memories. Also liked the ending. Fun, creepy ghost story that has you feeling cleansed afterwads.

( )

This story of a rare-book dealer haunted by the manifestation of a child's hand gripping his own started well, developed with sufficient interplay between the mundane and ghostly to make it creepily atmospheric, and Hill's descriptions of locale all added to the building tension which the ending, unfortunately, didn't quite pay off for me. Still a low pick, and if you like the classic ghost stories of E. F. Benson and M. R. James, then you'll probably like this, too. ( )

It was a place which had been left to the air and the weather, the wind, the sun, the rabbits and the birds, left to fall gently, sadly into decay, for stones to crack and paths to be obscured and then to disappear, for windowpanes to let in the rain and birds to nest in the roof. Gradually, it would sink in on itself and then into the earth. How old was this house? A hundred years? In another hundred there would be nothing left of it.

I turned. I could barely see ahead now. Whatever the garden, now "closed," had been, nature had taken it back, covered it with blankets of ivy and trailing strands of creeper, thickened it over with weed, sucked the light and the air out of it so that only the toughest plants could grow and in growing invade and occupy.

I should go back.

But I wanted to know more.

I feel obligated to say up front that I am probably being unfair to this book. I am tempted to bump it up a star just because.

This is a much better plotted and neatly delivered little ghost story than [b:The Mist in the Mirror|678362|The Mist in the Mirror|Susan Hill|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1420351953s/678362.jpg|664356]. In this tale, she stays with exactly one source of supernatural tension, manifesting almost always in the same single way. The opening chapters made the hair stand up on my arms. The sensation of being lost on country roads, of finding a deserted place, of the small hand. And the book is filled with moments like that, moments I could easily reference real fears from my own experience and let them be drawn forward in the story. (Well, not the small hand. But she makes it seem like something I could experience, and that is the key to real suspense.)

And then the side trail intervenes and the plot is lost. And the side trail isn't just any side trail; it's a totally out of left field wholly unbelievable one. I appreciate the love for books that shines through in the lady's work, but this was just impossible for me. Seriously, I don't care how adverse to dealing with the financials those monks were. The instant they decided to sell a First Folio they would have had ahold of Sotheby's in two seconds flat. Monks aren't stupid. I put the book down for most of a week. The tension drained away. The story and the writing held up when I got back to it, but never recovered from that loss.

So, if Ms. Hill ever writes a book that stays on task, it will scare the jeepers out of me, I already know it. In the meantime, I will continue to wish that she would pare these things down. This one could have lost 50 pages and the whole trip to France and it would have been a very nearly perfect ghost story. If you are more patient than I am (or have fewer hang ups about Shakespeare), you may well enjoy this one quite a lot more.

(Note: read in [b:The Small Hand and Dolly|17288633|The Small Hand and Dolly|Susan Hill|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1369779573s/17288633.jpg|23909819] but I prefer to review the separately published works in omnibus editions unless there is something unique to the omnibus. No such difference here.) ( )

This short novel should be read in one sitting, preferably alone and late at night to enhance the fear factor. Reaching out to turn the lamp off afterwards, I anticipated the feel of the small hand in mine. Chilling but not her best work to date ( )