Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Thoughts at the half way point of The Woman in Black

It has been a long time since anything ghostly set the hairs on the back of my neck up but already by the half way point in this book it has happened once and the prospect of it happening again are very high.

Hill weaves in a well crafted story. You know that the narrator survives because after all he is relating this story many years later but you also sense that he managed to get through his experience by a narrow margin.

Set against a backdrop of a simpler world the junior solicitor Arthur Kipps accepts the task of heading off into the back of beyond for his employer to catalogue the papers of one of their elderly and deceased clients. he arrives to find a village unwilling to talk about the house on the coastal flats, cut off by the high tide, and not prepared to help him deal with the task of getting to grips with the late Mrs Drablow papers.

The brave Kipps heads out to the house alone to try and deal with things but the strange events start to happen and you fear for his sanity as well as his life...