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Summary
Summary
A HAUNTING PAIR OF GHOST STORIES FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE WOMAN IN BLACK
The Small Hand
Antiquarian bookseller Adam Snow is returning from a client visit when he takes a wrong turn and stumbles upon a derelict Edwardian house with a lush, overgrown garden. As he approaches the door, he is startled to feel the unmistakable sensation of a small, cold hand creeping into his own, almost as though a child has taken hold of it. Shaken, he returns home to find himself plagued by nightmares. But when he decides to investigate the house's mysteries, he is troubled by increasingly sinister visitations.
Dolly
After being orphaned at a young age, Edward Cayley is sent to spend the summer with his forbidding Aunt Kestrel at Iyot house, her decaying estate on the damp, lonely fens in the west of England. With him is his spoiled, spiteful cousin Leonora. And when Leonora's birthday wish for a beautiful doll is denied, she unleashes a furious rage which will haunt Edward through the years to come.
Author Notes
Susan Hill has been a professional writer for over fifty years. Her books have won the Whitbread, the John Llewellyn Prize, and the W. Somerset Maugham Award, and have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her novels include Strange Meeting , I`m the King of the Castle and A Kind Man , and she has also published collections of short stories and two autobiographies. Her ghost story, The Woman in Black , has been running in London's West End since 1988. Susan is married with two adult daughters and lives in North Norfolk.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Spiritual malignance stemming from tragic pasts casts sinister nets of revelation and despair in two subtle, intelligent, and shocking modern ghost stories from Hill (The Woman in Black). These poetic and emotionally painful nightmares lay waste to the claim that the ghost story is dead and buried. In "The Small Hand," antiquarian bookseller Adam Snow visits the grounds of a derelict house, where a small, cold hand grasps his own. Urging him to self-annihilation, this wrathful spirit leads Adam to unravel an ancient crime that may involve his own family. In "Dolly," a future classic of the genre, Edward Cayley returns to his late Aunt Kestrel's Iyot House, where a moldering china doll weeps in a churchyard. Rage culminates in tragedy as a simple toy soiled by a child's hatred visits revenge on the innocent. Hill's unemotional style envelopes the uncanny in prosaic realism, and her suggestive approach achieves superb uneasiness. Unresolved moral complexities bedevil victims in an unjust universe where decency is no protection from evil. Hill's characters are haunted by conscience and insecurity as well as specters. Fear aficionados take note: these pleasing terrors shatter nerves with a whisper, not a scream. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Versatile, prolific, and polished British writer Hill presents two elegantly constructed ghost stories. Each evokes vengeful spirits relentlessly haunting the bleak English countryside in the wake of impulsive childhood wickedness. Hill further accentuates the malevolent persistence of the past by creating protagonists who are connoisseurs of history. In The Small Hand, Adam, a self-possessed, urbane antiquarian bookseller, is on his way to see a client when he stops to explore an estate that has fallen into ruin. There a small hand takes hold of him, as though an invisible child has placed its hand in his. Even when his quest for a Shakespeare first folio leads him to a remote French monastery, the insistent, increasingly alarming small hand follows. In Dolly, Edward, an architectural conservationist, returns to the scene of a stormy boyhood summer spent with his willful, wildly unhappy cousin, Leonora. Slowly he discerns, to his horror, that her violent ingratitude may have appalling repercussions. Steeped in folklore, Hill's supremely atmospheric and utterly unnerving tales of otherworldly retribution lead us deep into the dark labyrinth of the psyche.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"WE blot out bad things from our minds and especially when they have been bad things we ourselves have done, in childhood perhaps most of all." So says the narrator of "Dolly," the second of two short novels by Susan Hill in which bad things done in childhood refuse, despite grown-up minds' best efforts, to stay blotted. Nasty stuff of this sort may resurface after years of psychoanalysis or - less therapeutically if more efficiently - in the course of a compact, elegantly constructed ghost story, which happens to be one of Hill's specialties. Her nerve-shaking 1983 novel "The Woman in Black" is a modern classic of the genre, in the whispery manner of M. R. James and Robert Aickman. (It was made into a movie, unmemorably, last year; a stage adaptation has been running in London since 1988.) Hill is also something of an expert on awful children. Her best novel, "I'm the King of the Castle," is a chilling portrayal of juvenile psychopathy, the merciless destruction of one 11-year-old boy by another. Leonora, the dreadful child in "Dolly," is perhaps a tad less evil than the earlier book's little Edmund Hooper, but she's pretty hard to take - spoiled, narcissistic, brutally unconcerned with anyone's feelings but her own. And although the damage she does is trivial compared with Edmund's, her thoughtlessness is enough, apparently, to disturb the natural order of things: the English order, that is, which requires of children that they at least pretend to be kind. The cosmic retribution for Leonora's beastly behavior isn't swift: It doesn't arrive until decades later. But when it comes, it's thorough, devastating and breathtakingly disproportionate to the original offense. On the evidence of "Dolly," the native supernatural entities of England punish rudeness rather severely. Like all good British ghost-story writers, Hill believes in meticulous structure and very rough justice. In "The Small Hand," the punishable childhood deed is far more terrible, and the settling of accounts much sadder, because the once-bad child is, unlike Leonora, capable of remorse: The story is, in a way, a meditation on the long workings of guilt. The hand of the title, which from time to time takes hold of the narrator, is felt but never seen. It seems at first relatively benign, later almost pleasant, and later still positively alarming. The hand, a child's, isn't asking for reassurance. It's after something else, and its pressure becomes more and more insistent. On a treacherous mountain road, the narrator suddenly feels the hand. "But this time," he reports, "it was not nestling gently within my own, it held me in a vicious grip." He finds it "difficult to describe how determined and relentless the urging of the hand was, how powerful the force of something I could not see." This is, of course, the force of the human impulse to right a wrong, which seems to survive even death. What's most unnerving about "The Small Hand" is that the hero, a dealer in antiquarian books named Adam Snow, is (as his name suggests) entirely innocent of the wrong his tiny tormentor wants to see redressed. But in the world of ghost stories justice is blind. The offense, we learn, took place in a country garden, and as Hill develops her melancholy tale you may even begin to think, a bit, about original sin - the sort of shared universal guilt no one, finally, can escape. Maybe it's that uneasy feeling, or maybe it's the simple pleasure of confident British storytelling craftsmanship, but something pulls you through "The Small Hand" with relentless urgency. This writer's grip is vicious. In these stories, supernatural entities of England punish rudeness rather severely. TERRENCE RAFFERTY, the author of "The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies," is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
Library Journal Review
Hill's (The Woman in Black; The Man in the Picture) latest work is a double treat, two spooky stories written in Hill's characteristic classically inspired style. Previously published before as separate novellas, "The Small Hand" (2010) and "Dolly" (2012) are both gothic ghost stories complementary of each other. "The Small Hand" begins when rare book dealer Adam Snow finds himself lost on a desolate road in the English countryside. Mesmerized by a decrepit Edwardian house, Adam decides to stop to ask for directions. As he approaches the house, he feels a phantom child's hand on his own. Compelled to learn more, Adam explores the estate and its gardens, only eventually to learn the tragic truth of his past. In "Dolly," Edward Cayley returns to the isolated home of his deceased aunt. As a boy, Edward spent a summer here with cousin Leonora, a willful and unyielding child. When Leonora receives an inferior doll for her birthday, she reacts in hysterics, an event that stays with Edward into adulthood. All these years later, Edward meets with Leonora for the reading of the will at the house where the chilling consequences of Leonora's tantrum that day are fully realized. Verdict Atmospheric and foreboding, both stories provide quick yet satisfying scares. Highly recommended for horror fiction readers, especially fans of classical gothic literature (think Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House meets Henry James's The Turn of the Screw).-Carolann Curry, Mercer Univ. Lib., Macon, GA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
One It was a little before nine o'clock, the sun was setting into a bank of smoky violet cloud and I had lost my way. I reversed the car in a gateway and drove back half a mile to the fingerpost. I had spent the past twenty-four hours with a client near the coast and was returning to London, but it had clearly been foolish to leave the main route and head across country. The road had cut through the Downs, pale mounds on either side, and then run into a straight, tree-lined stretch to the crossroads. The fingerpost markings were faded and there were no recent signs. So that when the right turning came I almost shot past it, for there was no sign at all here, just a lane and high banks in which the roots of trees were set deep as ancient teeth. But I thought that this would eventually lead me back to the A road. The lane narrowed. The sun was behind me, flaring into the rear-view mirror. Then came a sharp bend, the lane turned into a single track and the view ahead was dark beneath overhanging branches. I slowed. This could not possibly be a way. Was there a house? Could I find someone to put me on the right road? I got out. Opposite me was an old sign, almost greened over. the white house. Below, someone had tacked up a piece of board. It hung loose but I could just make out the words garden closed in roughly painted lettering. Well, a house was a house. There would be people. I drove slowly on down the track. The banks were even steeper, the tree trunks vast and elephantine. Then, at the end of the lane I came out of the trees and into a wide clearing and saw that it was still light after all, the sky a pale enameled silver-blue. There was no through road. Ahead were a wooden gate and a high hedge wound about with briars and brambles. All I could hear were birds settling down, a thrush singing high up on the branches of a walnut tree and blackbirds pinking as they scurried in the undergrowth. I got out of the car and, as I stood there, the birdsong gradually subsided and then there was an extraordinary hush, a strange quietness into which I felt I had broken as some unwelcome intruder. I ought to have turned back then. I ought to have retraced my way to the fingerpost and tried again to find the main road. But I did not. I was drawn on, through the gate between the overgrown bushes. I walked cautiously and for some reason tried not to make a noise as I pushed aside low branches and strands of bramble. The gate was stuck halfway, dropped on its hinges, so that I could not push it open further and had to ease myself through the gap. More undergrowth, rhododendron bushes, briar hedge growing through beech. The path was mossed over and grassy but I felt stones here and there beneath my feet. After a hundred yards or so I came to a dilapidated hut which looked like the remains of an old ticket booth. The shutter was down. The roof had rotted. A rabbit, its scut bright white in the dimness of the bushes, scrabbled out of sight. I went on. The path broadened out and swung to the right. And there was the house. It was a solid Edwardian house, long and with a wide verandah. A flight of shallow steps led up to the front door. I was standing on what must once have been a large and well-kept forecourt--there were still some patches of gravel between the weeds and grass. To the right of the house was an archway, half obscured by rose briars, in which was set a wrought-iron gate. I glanced round. The car ticked slightly as the engine cooled. I should have gone back then. I needed to be in London and I had already lost my way. Clearly the house was deserted and possibly derelict. I would not find anyone here to give me directions. I went up to the gate in the arch and peered through. I could see nothing but a jungle of more shrubs and bushes, overarching trees, and the line of another path disappearing away into the darkening greenery. I touched the cold iron latch. It lifted. I pushed. The gate was stuck fast. I put my shoulder to it and it gave a little and rust flaked away at the hinges. I pushed harder and slowly the gate moved, scraping on the ground, opening, opening. I stepped through it and I was inside. Inside a large, overgrown, empty, abandoned garden. To one side, steps led to a terrace and the house. It was a place which had been left to the air and the weather, the wind, the sun, the rabbits and the birds, left to fall gently, sadly into decay, for stones to crack and paths to be obscured and then to disappear, for windowpanes to let in the rain and birds to nest in the roof. Gradually, it would sink in on itself and then into the earth. How old was this house? A hundred years? In another hundred there would be nothing left of it. I turned. I could barely see ahead now. Whatever the garden, now "closed," had been, nature had taken it back, covered it with blankets of ivy and trailing strands of creeper, thickened it over with weed, sucked the light and the air out of it so that only the toughest plants could grow and in growing invade and occupy. I should go back. But I wanted to know more. I wanted to see more. I wanted for some reason I did not understand to come here in the full light of day, to see everything, uncover what was concealed, reveal what had been hidden. Find out why. I might not have returned. Most probably, by the time I had made my way back to the main road, as of course I would, and reached London and my comfortable flat, the White House and what I had found there in the dusk of that late evening would have receded to the back of my mind and before long been quite forgotten. Even if I had come this way I might well never have found it again. And then, as I stood in the gathering stillness and soft spring dusk, something happened. I do not much care whether or not I am believed. That does not matter. I know. That is all. I know, as surely as I know that yesterday morning it rained onto the windowsill of my bedroom after I had left a window slightly open. I know as well as I know that I had a root canal filling in a tooth last Thursday and felt great pain from it when I woke in the night. I know that it happened as well as I know that I had black coffee at breakfast. I know because if I close my eyes now I feel it happening again, the memory of it is vivid and it is a physical memory. My body feels it, this is not only something in my mind. I stood in the dim, green-lit clearing and above my head a silver paring of moon cradled the evening star. The birds had fallen silent. There was not the slightest stirring of the air. And as 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. It felt cool and its fingers curled themselves trustingly into my palm and rested there, and the small thumb and forefinger tucked my own thumb between them. As a reflex, I bent it over and we stood for a time which was out of time, my own man's hand and the very small hand held as closely together as the hand of a father and his child. But I am not a father and the small child was invisible. Two It was after midnight when I got back to London and I was tired, but because what had happened to me was still so clear I did not go to bed until I had got out a couple of maps and tried to trace the road I had taken in error and the lane leading to the deserted house and garden. But nothing was obvious and my maps were not detailed enough. I needed several large-scale Ordnance Survey ones to have any hope of pinpointing an individual house. I woke just before dawn and as I surfaced from a dreamless sleep I remembered the sensation of the small hand taking hold of my own. But it was a memory. The hand was not there as it had been there, I was now quite sure, in the dusk of that strange garden. There was all the difference in the world, as there was each time I dreamed of it, which I did often during the course of the next few weeks. I am a dealer in antiquarian books and manuscripts. In the main I look for individual volumes on behalf of clients, at auction and in private sales as well as from other bookmen, though from time to time I also buy speculatively, usually with someone in mind. I do not have shop premises, I work from home. I rarely keep items for very long and I do not have a large store of books for sale at any one time because I deal at the upper end of the market, in volumes worth many thousands of pounds. I do collect books, much more modestly and in a disorganized sort of way, for my own interest and pleasure. My Chelsea flat is filled with them. My resolution every New Year is to halve the number of books I have and every year I fail to keep it. For every dozen I sell or give away, I buy twenty more. The week after finding the White House saw me in New York and Los Angeles. I then went on trips to Berlin, Toronto and back to New York. I had several important commissions and I was completely absorbed in my undertakings. Yet always, even in the midst of a crowded auction room, or when with a client, on a plane or in a foreign hotel, always and however full my mind was of the job I was engaged upon, I seemed to have some small part of myself in which the memory of the small hand was fresh and immediate. It was almost like a room into which I could go for a moment or two during the day. I was not in the least alarmed or troubled by this. On the contrary, I found it oddly comforting. I knew that when my present period of travel and activity was over I would return to it and try both to understand what had happened to me and if possible to return to that place to explore and to discover more about it--who had lived there, why it was empty. And whether, if I returned and stood there quietly, the small hand would seek mine again. I had one disconcerting moment in an airport while buying a newspaper. It was extremely busy and as I queued, first of all someone pushed past me in a rush and almost sent me flying and then, as I was still recovering myself, I felt a child's hand take my own. But when I glanced down I saw that it was the real hand belonging to a real small boy who had clutched me in panic, having also been almost felled by the same precipitate traveler. Within a few seconds he had pulled away from me and was reunited with his mother. The feeling of his hand had been in a way just the same as that of the other child, but it had also been quite different--hot rather than cool, sticky rather than silky. I could not remember when a real child had last taken my hand but it must have been years before. Yet I could distinguish quite clearly between them. It was mid-June before I had a break from traveling. I had had a profitable few weeks and among other things I had secured two rare Kelmscott Press books for my client in Sussex, together with immaculate signed first editions of all Virginia Woolf's novels, near-mint in their dust wrappers. I was excited to have them and anxious to get them out of my hands and into his. I am well insured, but no amount of money can compensate for the loss or damage of items like these. So I arranged to drive down with them. At the back of my mind was the idea that I would leave time to go in search of the White House again. Three Was there ever a June as glorious as that one? I had missed too much of the late spring but now we were in the heady days of balmy air and the first flush of roses. They were haymaking as I drove down and when I arrived at my client's house, the garden was lush and tumbling, the beds high and thick with flowers in full bloom, all was bees and honeysuckle and the smell of freshly mown grass. I had been invited to stay the night and we dined on a terrace from which there was a distant view of the sea. Sir Edgar Merriman was elderly, modest of manner and incalculably rich. His tastes were for books and early scientific instruments and he also had a collection of rare musical boxes which, when wound and set going, charmed the evening air with their sound. We lingered outside and Sir Edgar's blue-grey coils of cigar smoke wreathed upwards, keeping the insects at bay, the pungent smell mingling with that of the lilies and stocks in the nearby beds. His wife, Alice, sat with us, a small, grey-haired woman with a sweet voice and a shyness which I found most appealing. At one point the servant came to call Sir Edgar to the telephone and as she and I sat companionably in the soft darkness, the moths pattering around the lamp, I thought to ask her about the White House. Did she know of it? Could she direct me to it again? She shook her head. "I haven't heard of such a place. How far were you from here?" "It's hard to tell . . . I was hopelessly lost. I suppose I'd driven for forty-five minutes or so? Perhaps a bit longer. I took a byroad which I thought I knew but did not." "There are so many unsigned roads in the country. We all know our way about so well, but they are a pitfall for the unwary. I don't think I can help you. Why do you want to go back there, Mr. Snow?" Excerpted from The Small Hand and Dolly by Susan Hill All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
