derwinearl 's review for:

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

2.0

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If you are a fan of Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House or Matheson's Hell House, this book will likely be a letdown. Hill's story is obvious and derivative. There is one real moment of tension for the reader for one character, and it's a dog. The characters are barely developed. There is no reason to care about them, the ghost, or indeed anyone in the book as they are mostly one-dimensional. Otherwise, the story lays a Victorian sheen over a modern setting, and it uses elements of the Gothic, but none of it is original or important in any way to the story. The writing is poor in other ways, too. At one point, the narrator describes a car as capacious. A page or two later, the narrator describes a chair as capacious. This same sort of issue happens again later in the book. Most glaring, though, is that the story is telegraphed, so there is no real tension or horror, and I have found this to be an issue in other works by Hill as well. I desperately want more good ghost stories, but I don't think Hill will deliver them.