Susan Hill writes about curses and misfortunes, but her own career seemed charmed almost from the outset. How many authors get a novel accepted by a major publisher while they are still in high school? Ms. Hill was studying for A Levels while checking out the intense press coverage of her debut book The Enclosure —a book that was branded by t he Daily Mail as a “sex-ridden sensational novel.” Of course, that was the year (1960) of the Lady Chatterley' s Lover trial, and such denunciations only helped sales.
After this promising start, Hill enjoyed an extraordinary string of successes in her twenties and early thirties. She won the Somerset Maugham for I’m the King of the Castle (1970), the Whitbread Novel Award for The Bird of Night (1972) and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Albatross (1972)—the latter title also made the shortlist for the Booker Prize. That same year H ill was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the elite literary organization, founded by King George IV in 1820, which has allowed most of the great British authors of the last two centuries, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to J.K. Rowling to put the esteemed initials FRSL after their names.
Such accolades outght to be sufficient for even a charmed literary life, but Hill saved her biggest success for middle age. In 1983, not long after Hill’s fortieth birthday, she published The Woman in Black , a compact h orror novel, that has enjoyed enormous multimedia success. The stage play adaptation is the second longest-running dramatic production in the history of London’s West End—topped only by The Mousetrap . But it has proven almost as successful in Mexico and Japan. The play has been translated into at least a dozen languages and put on stage in some forty countries. The 2012 film version landed Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe as leading man, and grossed more than $100 million, setting a box office record for British horror flicks. Hill’s story has also shown up on television and radio.
But the novel that started this cascade of success continues to find an enthusiastic audience—a significant portion of it the children (and probably grandchildren) of its first generation of readers. The Woman in Black is, in short, a modern horror classic. The book is frequently assigned in schools—no doubt providing some satisfaction to Ms. Hill, who was told by the headmistress of Barr’s Hill, after the 'scandal' of her debut novel, that she "had brought shame and disgrace" to the school. When Hill makes a public appearance, the large contingent of teenage fans—seemingly more suitable for a Justin Bieber or One Direction performance—stands out in the audience.
Yet, despite all this acclaim, The Woman in Black is an unlikely success story. Hill's novel came out in the era that launched A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th as blockbuster franchises. The horror genre was getting bloodier and bloodier, with rising body counts and falling IQ points. Even horror novels were expected to churn out senseless gore—just check out Jack Ketchum’s bestselling Off Season go see how unsophisticated scare stories were in the early 1980s. In the midst of all that mutilation and dismemberment, Hill delivered a taut, slow-paced gothic ghost story, and somehow turned it into a mass market sensation.
Yes, a charmed life…how else can we account for it? Who would have thought that atmospheric suspense, a throwback to Daphne du Maurier if not Horace Walpole, could captivate the Freddy Krueger generation? Yet, in an odd way, Hill may have wisely timed her moment. At the very same juncture that The Woman in Black appeared in print, Universal was embarking on a program of re-releasing five classic Alfred Hitchcock films into movie theaters, and proving that a new generation of fans appreciated blood-free horror stories, built on implication rather than decapitation. Hill was working that same groove—indeed, you could almost imagine her, in an earlier day, writing screenplays for Mr. Hitchcock (and she later penned a sequel to Rebecca , one of that director’s biggest box office hits).
So much of The Woman in Black builds on mood, setting and the unspoken aspects of the story. A junior attorney, Arthur Kipps, has been sent by his firm to Crythin Gifford, a remote village in northeast England. Here he is to attend the funeral of deceased client, Alice Drablow, and review her private papers in preparation for settling the estate. But almost from the start, Kipps senses he has been assigned eerie, unsettling mission. Nobody wants to talk about Mrs. Drablow, but everyone who knew her seems to be withholding information. Some dark secret must be involved, but our young hero has no idea what it might be.
Another writer might be able to sustain this ambiguous tension, without any violence or physical threat let alone bloodshed, for twenty or thirty pages, but Hill maintains it for most of the novel. And when some disturbing deed finally breaks the ominous tranquility, it is presented indirectly—heard in the distance, or described in a letter.
If the book has gravitational center, it is neither the hero Kipps nor the deceased Drablow. Even the mysterious woman in dark, seen at a distance at several junctures in the book, is merely a bit player for most of the story’s duration. The real star of this novel is the house, the Drablow family manor, described and situated by the author with extraordinary care. I’ve read plenty of books about haunted houses, but this one comes to life in a way few others match. You will be able to see it vividly in your mind’s eye: the isolated manor at the end of a long causeway, surrounded by marshland and murky water, shrouded fog and mist. I’m hardly surprised that this novel was made into a successful movie—the visual element jumps off the page and almost demands transference to the screen.
And the most important supporting role here goes to the weather. "English weather is a gift to English writers," Hill has commented, and she demonstrates that again and again in The Woman in Black . "I am sure it is possible to set a ghost story on a bright sunny day," she adds—but she must have been saving that trick for another book. In this novel, the fog, the cold, the rising damp and falling mist are employed with subtle skill, and even become key elements in the plot. I suspect that readers of this novel, when recalling it years later, think first of the mist and the house, and only later of the protagonist and his preoccupations.
But Hill isn’t just a mood-maker and scene-setter. When she eventually unleashes her malevolent lady dressed in mourning, she will shock you—and with all the more intensity because of the great care she has devoted to laying the groundwork for this moment. The slow build-up pays off with a vengeance when Hill moves her story into its final paces.
No, this isn’t a novel for horror genre fans seeking another Books of Blood or American Psycho . This novel is a throwback, a reminder of an earlier conception of suspense storytelling. But if you are old school, you will find kindred spirits in this novel—in which people have access to automobiles, but still prefer to travel in a pony-drawn carriage, and ignore the telephone in order to send letters by post.
This feels like a Victorian novel, even though it was written in Thatcher’s England and set in a modern day. There’s nothing virtual or digital to be found anywhere in these pages. But the eerie isn't digital either—that elusive quality thrives at the border between the palpable and the metaphysical, the perceived and the imagined. And those are intersections Susan Hill knows well, and where her woman in black lurks. It’s old school indeed, but hardly a nostalgia trip, and suspenseful in ways the new schools might want to emulate.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His most recent book, Love Songs: The Hidden History , is published by Oxford University Press.
If you are old school, you will find kindred spirits in this novel—in which people have access to automobiles, but still prefer to travel in a pony- drawn carriage, and ignore the telephone in order to send letters by post.