The Woman in Black: Susan Hill

Tell me...isn't this a fantastic cover? I love the simplicity of it, I love the font and the shades of grey. The "21" is for 21 years of the Vintage Publishing in the UK, and in the series they are republishing "twenty-one of our most iconic books in a rainbow of beautiful colours." Well, yes, please. I am such a book geek that I would like to have all twenty-one, and I don't even care which books the other twenty are.

Enough about design. Let's talk book for a moment or two. From the back blurb:

Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor, is summoned to attend the funeral of Mrs Alice Drablow, the sole inhabitant of Eel Marsh House. Unaware of the tragic secrets which lie there, wreathed in fog and mystery, it is not until he glimpses a wasted young woman, dressed all in black, at the funeral that a creeping sense of unease begins to take hold, a feeling deepened by the reluctance of the locals to talk of the woman in black - and her terrible purpose.

All of the classic elements are here. The eerie and seemingly abandoned house, secluded in location that is entirely subject to the tides for its access. The bucolic English village, where everyone seems to know everything but won't talk. The large landowner, set apart from the others and viewed with a degree of distrust and jealousy. And the young, ambitious man who arrives in town proud of what his employer has asked him to do, and determined to see it through.

What really surprised me about The Woman in Black is how compressed the time is. The book is only 200 pages with a decent sized font and good spacing so it shouldn't come as a surprise, but the plot is crafted so carefully that the short period of time which actually covers Arthur's time at Eel Marsh House seems to be weeks, months. This compression adds to the intensity of the scenes where things literally go bump - and scream - in the night.

This book is also so visual in its crafting that I saw, I exactly saw what the author crafted, and am now convinced that Eel Marsh House is a real place.

It [the house] was remarkable and extraordinary in only one respect - its situation. From every window - and they were tall and wide in each room - there was a view of one aspect or the other of the marshes and the estuary and the immensity of the sky, all colour had been drained and blotted out of them now, the sun had set, the light was poor, there was no movement at all, no undulation of the water, and I could scarcely make out any break between land and water and sky. All was grey. I managed to let up every blind and to open one or two of the windows. The wind had dropped altogether, there was no sound save the faintest, softest suck of water as the tide crept in. How one woman had endured day after day, night after night, of isolation in this house, let alone for so many years, I could not conceive. I should have gone mad.

The "softest suck of water as the tide crept in." How is that so descriptive, so accurate, and so ominous at the same time? I can hear that sound, I've heard it a thousand times, and yet at this moment that suck of water feels threatening.

The Woman in Black is a fine, creepy novel that left me shivering at points, had me creeping out of bed for a glass of water in my dark flat convinced there was going to be a woman in black waiting for me in the kitchen. (There wasn't.)


This is who I was expecting. So let's talk about the film for a minute, since that's the reason I picked the book in the first place. If you haven't seen the teaser trailer, spend 1:44 on it now.




In retrospect, this long-form trailer suggests a plot perhaps quite embellished from the book. And you know what? I think that's great. For one, I want to see this film as a film as opposed to a line-by-line redo of the book, and there's some immensely frightening stuff going on here. However, the teaser trailer has more of a bookish feel:



(And...it's a Hammer film!!! Don't ask me why, but I have a strong affinity for Hammer as a production company.)

Either way, I'm still game. A finely-crafted novel can become a well-tuned film. I have the chills just thinking about it. So we have a very win-win situation here: a creepy, atmospheric book well worth a read, that looks like it's been turned into a frightening, well-crafted film well worth a see.

I love it when that happens.