Review: The Kind Man by Susan Hill

In a previous review, I've mentioned the difficulties authors must face when trying to follow up on a huge literary hit.

Just as pop artists must struggle to live up to that big number one, still played at office parties twenty years later, so it must be a similar challenge for writers who have knocked out a story which instantly became a modern classic.

Susan Hill's The Woman in Black is a universally acclaimed ghost story which sits proudly alongside the work of MR James and Charles Dickens, when it comes to a beautifully constructed and truly scary supernatural fiction. Although Hill has since become a very successful crime writer, she has also turned out a number of other ghost stories and, in my humble opinion, none have come close to the giddying highs of Eel Marsh House and its creepy inhabitant.

Now it is not for me to suggest that her subsequent efforts have failed in their intention - indeed, she might have been aiming for something distinctly different from The Woman in Black, in which case she has succeeded. But as a reader, I found her second-to-latest book, The Small Hand, to be disappointing and I'm afraid I feel the same way about The Kind Man.

To be fair, I don't think this is meant to be a ghost story. I'm not entirely sure what it is meant to be, but I'm pretty certain it's not meant to be frightening, so fair enough. Thought-provoking it most certainly is.

Set in a poor rural village in some indistinct time in the past, The Kind Man follows the story of a young woman who marries a nice chap and settles down to humble working class life. While her sister turns out several children, only to sink into depression and lovelessness, the woman has one daughter who later dies.

The grief-stricken couple attempt to go on with her lives, but things take an even worse turn when her husband loses his job and develops cancer. But there seems to be a miracle in store for them both - a miracle which will have far-reaching and unforeseeable consequences.

I'll be honest - I got bored with this story. It is immensely well-written, but the pace was slow, even for such a short novel, and I was a bit irritated by the apparent moral that kicked in towards the end. I also didn't really understand the connection between their daughter's death and the husband's experience. Although I could guess at it, I found that I didn't really care because the story didn't seem to fit together properly in my mind.

A great story should leave you feeling equally fulfilled and bereft when the final page is turned. Unfortunately, the characters in The Kind Man were not compelling enough to capture me and as the story also failed on that point, I was quite relieved to be able to put the book down and move on to something else.

Review: The Small Hand by Susan Hill

The Woman in Black is one of my favourite books and it appears to be universally popular, spawning not only a long-running stage production but also a new film, due to star Harry Potter poppet, Daniel Radcliffe.

I suppose the trouble with having a massively successful and respected hit is that you are always going to spend the rest of your life trying to repeat it. Hill is a hugely gifted writer and all of her books that I have read have entertained me greatly, so I do not suggest for a moment that they are not good reads in their own right. But the ghost story is a genre in which it is notoriously hard to hit the right buttons and when you have pulled off a near perfect execution once, it might not be easy to remember the combination a second time.

Two of Hill's other books, The Man in the Picture and The Mist in the Mirror, are decent enough ghost stories but I found they completely lacked the chill factor that The Woman in Black brings in bucketloads. So I came to The Small Hand with only middling expectations.

Beautifully bound in an embossed jacket, this book is a very attractive addition to any collection and I am a sucker for a book that looks and feels divine. Funnily enough though, the lovely cover does add something not only to the reading experience, but to the story itself. This very short novel follows the adventure of Adam Snow, a dealer in antiquarian books and the luxurious feel of the cover and the stylish font seem to add credence to his world, as if the reader might have picked up one of Snow's own treasures.

Stumbling across a derelict house in deepest Sussex one day, Snow explores the overgrown garden and is considerably alarmed when he feels the unmistakeable sensation of a small child's hand softly gripping his own. The experience haunts him and understandably makes him want to find out more about the garden's ghostly resident. But as time goes on, the small hand becomes less gentle and appears to reveal a malevolent intent.

Set in the present day, The Small Hand nevertheless manages to convey the sense of timelessness and 'other worldliness' at which Hill excels. I suppose not all ghost stories have to be terrifying to succeed and there is certainly a disconcerting atmosphere to the book. But unfortunately I just didn't find it scary. It just didn't touch those magic buttons that leave you unsettled, creeped out or revisited by certain images when you are alone at night.

For me, the mark of a great ghost story is that at some point in the future, you kind of wish you hadn't read it. And sadly The Small Hand leaves me untroubled.