The Woman in Black

This is one of those times where a story is so tropey that it's formulaic, but where the author unabashedly and completely leans into the trope as to make it pretty enjoyable to read.

The premise of this book is oddly similar to that of Bram Stoker's Dracula. A young, upcoming, and betrothed lawyer is sent to a remote estate to take care of a client's paperwork. He first meets townspeople who seem positively traumatised by the said estate and whatever lurks those grounds, but who all remain maddeningly reticent and silent, and simply just give him furtive scared looks and ominous cryptic hints. Lawyer has to hole himself up in the said estate to complete his work, and you probably can fill in the rest.

But whereas in Dracula there is an active malevolence that dogs the steps of Jonathan Harker, in The Woman In Black, the evil is a bit more passive. We get the sense that Arthur Kipps had simply stumbled into the wrong place at the wrong time. Arthur meanwhile constantly swings between being balls-of-steel fearless and scared shit senseless, all of which simply serves to place him in situations to experience the ghostliness of the story. The beginning of this book was also a little messy and confusing, where we are first introduced to Arthur Kipps at different ages all at once, but certainly gets better once the storytelling becomes more linear. The plot is fairly predictable throughout and doesn't serve up any mind-bending twists, but even when you see it coming, it's still executed pretty well and makes a pretty enjoyable read.

When you can see most of the plot points coming, it does take something away from the horror aspect of it. This book makes for a great verbal ghost story, and I can even see why it makes for excellent material for adaptation into the mediums of film and theatre, so it's a bit odd that in its original textual medium it falls a bit flat. I never really felt properly scared throughout even though I knew I was reading scary moments. It was scary only insofar that I can imagine it being a properly scary moment in a movie.

I'll leave more commentary under spoilers about the horror aspect of the book since it would inevitably spoil the plot, but suffice to say that this is indeed a “classic ghost story”. This is probably an excellent tale to recount around the campfire, or would make a great Halloween read. It's almost self-aware in that the story begins with Arthur being unexpectedly triggered when his family is telling each other ghost stories around the fire on Christmas Eve, which then motivates him to put down his experiences on paper. So if you go in with that expectation, you certainly won't be disappointed.

Spoilery thoughts: The book felt like a textbook skeleton model of “how a ghost story should go”. We have the retrospective suspense when Arthur keeps repeating how traumatised he is from that incident in his life so long ago, then the prospective suspense when he's starting from the beginning and then talking about how everyone in that village gave him weird looks. Then of course we have the nights spent alone in the manor (usually starts off accidentally) where more ghostly incidents happen, some hints of the backstory of the ghost (there must always be one), a climax, and then eventually rescue and salvation after which the hero will certainly find out the full story of the ghost, then ending with the creepy “the ghost still survives” moment where we find out what happens in the future with Arthur's wife and son. It's a very very common horror formula and it was so obvious here that Hill might as well have written this as a casual example in a writing class.Also, the fact that the Arthur immediately concludes that the thing he's seeing is a ghost almost from the get-go and then spends the rest of the book just basically saying, “I ain't scared of no ghosts.” in his bravado kinda takes something away from the suspense. A lot of horror stories work better when there's a bit of suspense for the reader in who/what exactly the malevolent entity is, but in this one, we know immediately that these are just... ghosts, just spirits of people who are dead, so there's nothing more to know about them. The ghosts were completely unmysterious for most of the book and so there was no veil to pull down later in the book, which therefore resulted in a pretty meh climax.I might have overlooked this more if the story also gave me something a bit more with the ghost's backstory, but even there it felt rather unsubstantial. So the ghost turns out to be Jennet, a mother driven to grief and sorrow after her child dies in a drowning accident. She nurses a lifelong hatred for Alice Drablow simply because she was the one who asked them to go out on that trip to town that day? It just seems a little out of proportion. I'm by no means disregarding the enormity of grief a parent can have for a child who passes suddenly, but the way this was explained and portrayed in the book just doesn't do it justice. I can't quite understand or get behind how deep Jennet's hatred and evilness must be, or why she seems to be targeting other children around the town. For that matter, why does she target Arthur in the end, and why so long after his visit to Eel Marsh? Perhaps she was jealous of other children surviving when hers didn't and that jealousy was so strong that it eclipsed her sanity, but that was never quite conveyed and that point was never really driven home to the reader imo.