Some really creepy moments. Victorian in feel so be forewarned if that's not your kind of ghost story. If it is this is a great quick read.
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This is one I struggle to rate (I'm struggling to rate a lot lately - often 3 feels unfair with something I've enjoyed, but if I stick to many into 4 I can't distinguish between just *how* good something is as much - oh well). 4 in the end because I think it is a very effective story - it's a pastiche of a certain idea of a Victorian ghost story, but it's written really well, with constant ratcheting up of the tension until a shocking, grim release right at the very end, with only the ending being a slight deviation from the usual quite gentle scares of Victorian horror. It fits what we imagine the cliches to be, but uses them well enough that it reminds you why they're cliches in the first place.

And... that's part of the issue I had with it. I think it cleaving so strongly to a particular idea of Victorian ghost stories creates some dissonance and makes it much more noticeable when it deviates. Notably there's motor cars and electric(? or piped gas?) lighting with running water even on a spit of land in the sea in the arse end of nowhere. I was surprised how much this bothered me - it must be interwar period but it just feels so strangely out of place in a story that otherwise wants so badly to be THE Victorian ghost story. I kept trying to pin down what era this could actually be, which was distracting.

The ending is another element to this - I'm hardly an *expert* on the genre in its 19th century form but in interviews she's cited Henry and MR James and the ending strikes me as much more... aggressive? Than either of those. Which is maybe unfair, just somehow it felt out of line from my expectations usually ghosts stick in one place, and the occasions they chase you are due to very specific "fair" actions that you take, eg taking a haunted object. A ghost killing your wife and child in a place hundreds of miles away years after just feels wrong and again that sounds unfair? But it's precisely because it otherwise works so hard to evoke our ideas of the Victorian style that it felt dissonant to me.

You shouldn't take this as too harsh a criticism - I did genuinely enjoy it and was glued the whole way through. It is really a perfect example of what someone nowadays imagines a Victorian ghost story to be, and avoids some of the boringness of the originals without ever upping the stakes like a more modern story might, trusting that its evocation of a sinister atmosphere will do the job (and it does). Plot wise, I really would have loved to know how on earth Alice Drablow lived and transacted her affairs, but ah well. ( )

I did prefer the movie but that’s probably because I could visualise it better , I like the concept of this story though ( )

I liked it well enough but it took awhile to get into it. Had no interest in reading it until Gavin and Simon at The Readers bemoaned the awful Hollywood ending of the movie. The movie got the atmosphere and tone down, but changed many of the details, so if this book is assigned for school reading, don't rely on the movie. Read the bloody book. ( )

A bit of a fun ghost story, complete with a house right out of Poe. "I looked up ahead and saw, as if rising out of the water itself, a tall, gaunt house of gray stone with a slate roof, that now gleamed steelily in the light."

Our narrator first confronts the woman in black in a graveyard. How appropriate is that? The story is Gothic in flavor, reminiscent of The Turn of the Screw, and crammed with cliches that work perfectly. I was surprised by the ending, which doesn't happen all that often. I liked that Hill built into the story right away and kept it quick and clean. Nothing there that wasn't needed. Well done.
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