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She said she found it fascinating when the nation was gripped with a particular news story. I thought there were two very interesting things about this book, which made it far greater than just any old ghost story.įirstly, I recently saw Susan Hill give a talk, in which she was predominantly talking about her Simon Serrailler crime series. While I have tried not to really spell it out, perhaps it’s only fair to warn you that if you want to avoid any risk of potential spoilers, you better look away now.

It’s tricky to discuss it without giving things away.

Then there are a couple of brilliant twists in the plot and it ends with a sudden raw feeling of slack-jawed surprise – and of admiration for Susan Hill’s storytelling skill. Adam discovers that there was a boy who drowned in the pond at the derelict house, and suspects that this small hand belongs to his ghost. Even a quiet pool in a very holy French monastery. Adam suffers alarming panic attacks and feels impelled to throw himself into any nearby body of water. The reader gets the impression that it’s a friendly kind of ghost, one who might help him.īut things take a turn for the worse when the tugging at his hand recurs, swiftly becoming violent and trying to pull him to his death. Surprisingly, Adam Snow doesn’t feel spooked in a horrid way by this sensation, in fact he rather likes it, and wishes he could feel it again. He is strangely drawn to the house and then,Īs I stood I felt a small hand creep into my right one, as if a child had come up beside me in the dimness and taken hold of it. The story is narrated by Adam Snow, an antiquarian bookseller, who gets lost on a winding country road and ends up by a derelict house. And perhaps that kind of tension and thrill counts as being scary in its own way. But it only took ten pages or so to get me completely gripped, longing to know what would happen next, where the eerie ghostly grip of the hand would take me. In other words I wasn’t expecting to find it particularly scary.Īnd I’m not sure that it was scary in a gory, terrifying, panic-inducing way. So I read The Small Hand with a certain naïve scepticism. I’m not sure that I’ve ever read a proper ghost story, other than The Turn of the Screw and a few various gothic moments that have incidentally come my way via bits and pieces of literature.

It would be weird to feel too spine-tinglingly chilly in the heat of summer, whereas now it would be forgiven for prompting another cup of tea or making one draw a little closer to the fire. It was a choice based on the feeling that a ghost story was the right sort of thing to read in winter. Last week I read The Small Hand by Susan Hill.