Enjoyably Good ( )

Creepy, atmospheric, and fast paced. I loved the narrator too, I’ve missed him since Evelyn Hardcastle! ( )

Susan Hill's recipe for a gothic-type ghost story is really appealing to me. I love the atmosphere, the horror, the clichés. No-one does modern horror quite like Hill.

The thing I love most is that the characters seem to always know what's up but they either forget or don't allow themselves to believe in the supernatural. It's a very effective technique in building atmoshpere and believability and she's the master of it.

Unfortunately, lately, reading more of her I've noticed a pattern I find hard to unsee. One that was very prominent in this story.

Get a clueless and blameless well-meaning male protagonist. Get a vengeful woman. Doom poor male and everyone surrounding him. The end.

It's the third story that follows this motif - the 4rth that has the same blameless, naive, kind, male protagonist if I could The Small Hand- and I'm starting to question Hill's motives behind this, and even whether this is a conscious choice or some fragment of internalized misogyny popping up to say hello.

The colonialist views of "oriental" countries was also a poor choice and in general the novel had a feeling of being written in the previous century. Very disappointed.

Now a recap, with spoilers, so I can remember what I read and not confuse it with the myriad gothic stories I want t read.

*spoilers ahead*

Welp. Grown man returns home to the house of his deceased aunt. Bratty cousin also returns. She is pretty and therefore vain, like her mother. And has a lot of husbands like her mother. And is greedy. Because b!tches-am-i-riteeee-ey.
Flashback of when they were little and spent some time is said house. Cue everyone saying girl is possessed and evil. She's not really though.
Girl was insufferable, kept asking for an elaborate doll, broke porcelain doll she got because it wasn't the one she wanted. Boy heard doll crying and was creeped out. Buried her.
Years later they inherit house and dig out the doll that has aged.
Protagonist travels abroad, finds a doll just like the one his cousin wanted when young, buys it for her but forgets about it.
Years later the cousin has a child and husband dies and is poor and moves back to house and lo and behold! Her child has a horrible aged face just like the doll because of a disease.
Years later protagonist has a daughter. She becomes disfigured. Protagonist finds forgotten doll he bought for cousin and lo and behold! It's disfigured just like his daughter is.
THE END. ( )

The taste of the fog came into my mouth and its damp web touched my skin. But through its felted layers, from far away, I heard it again, half in my own head, half out there, and then everything came vividly back, the scene with Leonora in Aunt Kestrel's sitting room, her rage, the crack of the china head against the fireplace, my own fear, prompting my heart to leap in my chest. All, all of it I remembered--no, re-lived, my heart pounding again, as I stood at the window and through the fog-blanketed darkness heard the sound again.

Deep under the earth, inside its cardboard coffin, shrouded in the layers of white paper, the china doll with the jagged open crevasse in its skull was crying.

How could a story containing these lines be anything other than awesome? This book should have been so, so much better than it was. I've thought about it now for a couple days and I'm still so disgusted with it that I've decided the initial three star mark was much too generous, so I'm bumping it down. Susan Hill is unfortunately headed for the same place as Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft, which is not praise from me. Sure, she can write in the sense of stringing great words together. (Man, can she write in that sense!) But she does not seem to understand how to hang a blasted story together.

This one starts out great (all her books do), and picks one theme (too many themes was the downfall of [b:The Mist in the Mirror|678362|The Mist in the Mirror|Susan Hill|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1420351953s/678362.jpg|664356]), but, like [b:The Small Hand|8675320|The Small Hand A Ghost Story|Susan Hill|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327926842s/8675320.jpg|13547206], the mystery is inexplicably set aside by the protagonist in favor of business trips, and unlike The Small Hand, the curse is not well thought out or executed. Also, most of the plot relies on one of my least favorite of all tropes, the protagonist who, golly gee whiz, just cannot remember the horrible traumatic thing that happened or what the significance of it might be.

So, the writing is great, the horror is shocking, but the story is succumbs to stupid. Avoid.

(Note: I read this in the omnibus, [b:The Small Hand and Dolly|17288633|The Small Hand and Dolly|Susan Hill|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1369779573s/17288633.jpg|23909819]. I prefer to review bundled books separately.) ( )

I had high hopes for this short book, having very much enjoyed I'm the King of the Castle and The Woman in Black. However, nothing about the story really amounts to anything. It has a number of the ingredients of a ghost story - spooky old house, weird children, lovely old aunt and grumpy old maid, isolated, lonesome setting, and, well - a doll or two. The 'reveal', if there is one, just repeats itself.

I kept on reading, thinking that although the writing wasn't particularly prosaic, all the rustling and screaming and crying, and the summer heat, rain and Bagatelle, must be building to something worthwhile.

Then I reached the end and realised that the denouement was about as unsurprising and unrewarding a climax to any novel/novella, that I have read in a long time. Some of the atmospherics are good, especially when describing Edward's first impressions of Iyot House and it's inhabitants, and his first, hesitant impressions of his cousin, the awful Leonora.

I still plan to explore more of Susan Hill's work, but this one was disappointing. ( )