The Woman in Black

Too boring, most things could be explained away with logic. I need spookier

I think I might be in the minority here, but I wasn't crazy about this book. Parts of it were scary, and the titular woman was certainly scary, but it seemed like a lot of people were just dumb. I'm not going to give away the big reveal, but given the consequences of messing with the Woman in Black, you'd think someone would say something for god's sake.

I also tend to measure every ghost story against

The Turn of the Screw. Did this measure up?* No, despite the great setting (I loved the marshes and the causeway that came and went with the tides). It was okay, a slow beginning but a good ending.

*Spoiler: nothing will ever measure up. But it can come close.

All atmosphere little substance

And there they lay, those glittering, beckoning, silver marshes with the sky pale at the horizon where it reached down to the water of the estuary. A thin breeze blew off them with salt on its breath. Even from as far away as this I could hear the mysterious silence, and once again the haunting, strange beauty of it all aroused a response deep within me.

The Woman in Black was, unfortunately, a disappointment, a quick read with an eerie atmosphere and taut build-up that ultimately fizzled out.

The descriptions are, by far, the best thing about the book. The quality is a bit uneven, but it generally worked for me. Hill seems to be attempting a Victorian pastiche—a bit odd and confusing as the book is clearly post-Victorian with flashlights, electric lights, telephones, and cars all making appearances—complete with obscured names (

“Nor ever of Eel Marsh, in —shire?”) and pages upon pages on the fog, the graveyard, the marsh, and so on, all of which are fantastic set pieces that fit the gothic feel without being too cliche. She tends to throw in the occasional comma splice, which wouldn’t usually bother me but here somewhat ruins the effect—just put a semicolon there instead, the Victorians stuffed them in by the fistful.

Otherwise, it fell flat for me. Not only was I never scared, but the ghost story itself felt fairly cliched and was entirely predictable, in part thanks to the strange choice to establish the main character as a widower telling the story years after it happened, which completely undercuts the suspense. Other decisions made by Hill similarly erode the tension, like giving the nearly inaccessible Eel Marsh House electricity and constantly shuttling Kipps back and forth from the House to the safety of the town. What’s more, I didn’t find the story or characters especially moving or even interesting, even from a thematic standpoint.

I am still interested to read more from Hill, as I did enjoy this book—even if it was ultimately disappointing. 3.5 stars, rounding down.

Some favorite passages:

I have always liked to take a breath of the evening, to smell the air, whether it is sweetly scented and balmy with the flowers of midsummer, pungent with the bonfires and leaf-mold of autumn, or crackling cold from frost and snow. I like to look about me at the sky above my head, whether there are moon and stars or utter blackness, and into the darkness ahead of me; I like to listen for the cries of nocturnal creatures and the moaning rise and fall of the wind, or the pattering of rain in the orchard trees, I enjoy the rush of air toward me up the hill from the flat pastures of the river valley.

The sky was pricked over with stars and the full moon rimmed with a halo of frost.

Fog was outdoors, hanging over the river, creeping in and out of alleyways and passages, swirling thickly between the bare trees of all the parks and gardens of the city, and indoors, too, seething through cracks and crannies like sour breath, gaining a sly entrance at every opening of a door. It was a yellow fog, a filthy, evil-smelling fog, a fog that choked and blinded, smeared and stained.

The business was beginning to sound like something from a Victorian novel, with a reclusive old woman having hidden a lot of ancient documents somewhere in the depths of her cluttered house. I was scarcely taking Mr. Bentley seriously.

Here and there were clumps of reeds, bleached bone-pale, and now and again the faintest of winds caused them to rattle dryly.

As I neared the ruins, I could see clearly that they were indeed of some ancient chapel, perhaps monastic in origin, and all broken-down and crumbling, with some of the stones and rubble fallen, probably in recent gales, and lying about in the grass.

There were perhaps fifty old gravestones, most of them leaning over or completely fallen, covered in patches of greenish-yellow lichen and moss, scoured pale by the salt wind, and stained by years of driven rain. The mounds were grassy, and weed-covered, or else they had disappeared altogether, sunken and slipped down. No names or dates were now decipherable, and the whole place had a decayed and abandoned air.

It was a mist like a damp, clinging cobwebby thing, fine and yet impenetrable. It smelled and tasted quite different from the yellow filthy fog of London; that was choking and thick and still, this was salty, light and pale and moving in front of my eyes all the time. I felt confused, teased by it, as though it were made up of millions of live fingers that crept over me, hung on me and then shifted away again. My hair and face and the sleeves of my coat were already damp with a veil of moisture.

The furniture had a faded bloom from the salt in the air and the candlesticks and épergne were tarnished, the linen cloths stiffly folded and interleaved with yellowing tissue, the glass and china dusty.

Only one door was locked, at the far end of a passage that led away from three bedrooms on the second floor. There was no keyhole, no bolt on the outside.

I did not look about me, though sometimes I glanced up into the great bowl of the night sky and at the constellations scattered there and the sight was comforting and calming to me, things in the heavens seemed still to be aright and unchanged.

There lay the marshes, silver-gray and empty, there was the water of the estuary, flat as a mirror with the full moon lying upturned upon it. Nothing. No one.

The wardrobe door and the drawers of the small chest were pulled open and all the clothes they contained half dragged out, and left hanging like entrails from a wounded body.