The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

A classic ghost story which begins with the traditional telling of ghost stories on Christmas Eve by the stepsons of Arthur Kipps. Stories that have an increasingly unsettling affect on him and when asked to contribute he refuses and leaves the house.

" Yes, I had a story, a true story, a story of haunting and evil, fear and confusion, horror and tragedy. But it was not a story to be told for casual entertainment, around the fireside on Christmas Eve."

 In the hope of freeing himself from his past experience Arthur decides to write his story down.

He tells of a time when,as a young solicitor, he was sent to a remote village by his employer to attend the funeral of Mrs Alice Drablow, an elderly recluse who lived at Eel Marsh House which stood isolated from the village at the end of a causeway. The sense of unease he feels when he sees a wasted young woman, dressed all in black, at the funeral, is heightened by the villagers reluctance to talk of her and their efforts to dissuade him from spending the night at Eel Marsh House. 

Although no definite time period is indicated the writing has a late Victorian/Edwardian style reminiscent of ghostly tales of that era.
With great restraint the author provides a setting with a menacing Gothic atmosphere...............thick London pea-soup fog and drifting marsh mists, a grim and desolate old house, graveyards and abbey ruins........and a woman in black with an expression of 'a desperate, yearning malevolence.'

It has the effect of placing one firmly in Arthur's shoes, sharing the increasingly mysterious and frightening experiences that his rational mind can't explain..... feeling the slowly mounting terror as the story of the woman in black is gradually revealed.

The ending is devastating!

For me, the perfect ghost story. I loved it!

R.I.P VII