The Woman in Black

Written by Susan Hill and made into a very fine horror film starring Daniel Radcliffe, The Woman in Black is a small but successfully spooky ghost story that is phenomenally easy to read, I myself finished it in two days but would have easily completed it one of uninterrupted reading, and I greatly enjoyed it. It’s compelling, eerie, very easy to understand, and paints a very spooky and beautiful picture in the mind’s eye of the reader. I enjoyed it very much. 

Much time has passed since Arthur Kipps encountered a terrible haunting. He believed he had gotten over the worst of the nightmares, but one Christmas Eve his in-laws indulge in telling ghost stories and, when pressed for his input, he leaves the celebrations in a state of mild distress. He then decides to write his story of the Woman in Black: a ghostly spectre he first glimpsed on a business trip in a tiny village at the funeral of his client. As business demanded he spend time at the deceased’s estate to sort through her papers he does so and there he glimpses the sinister woman again. Not only that, but a horrible feeling of hatred, revenge, and grief clouds over the house and Arthur is troubled further still by terrible noises out on the marshes that surrounds the estate. The locals are unwilling to talk about it and so Arthur becomes determined to discover the identity of the ghostly woman, only to discover that her haunting of him in that house is just another step in her quest for revenge. 

The book is quite different in comparison to the film, but that’s not to say that it is a bad piece of work. Set as a recount or reminiscence and therefore, in the first person register, The Woman in Black is not only a story that describes a ghost and a haunting, but what the haunting does to the physical and mental state of the haunted. We see the protagonist, Arthur Kipps, go to this small country village as an idealistic, proud, and irrepressible youth, and then transform into a weak and desecrated shell of a human being during the haunting. We read about and share the terror that he suffered and we also understand and silently applaud the man’s bravery at recounting these horrible events, thus reliving all the horror a second time. 

The writing is quite simple to understand and what I really liked about it was that even though is was so easy to just plough through, it also was mightily strong in painting both horrible and beautiful pictures in the mind’s eye of the reader. Reading about the marshes and the gloomy, but mystic fogs holds the same appeal as the misty moors featured in The Hound of the Baskervilles or Wuthering Heights and I found that just reading about them took me right there. 

Filled with suspense, drama, horror, and ghastly apparitions, The Woman in Black is a great book: one that is very easy to read and compelling from the first page.