A Dark and Stormy Night from Susan Hill
The Man in the Picture (A Ghost Story) by Susan Hill is a wonderful mood story, a period piece, a swift and sure transportation to where the night is dark and stormy, the chill is inside as well as out, and evil holds sway. I was shivering in my boots and I couldn’t out the book down; I read it cover to cover and only then took a deep breath and sighed. What a wonderful ride.
The language is perfect at creating mood. The book reads like a Wilkie Collins ghost story (although he would have gone further with the language and not necessarily to better affect: Hill reaches perfect pitch). We start in the sitting room of a Cambridge don:
“We had eaten a good dinner, drunk a good bottle of claret, and we were stretched out comfortably in our chairs before a good fire. But the winter wind, coming up as always straight off the Fens, howled round and occasionally a burst of hail rattled against the glass.”
Then the story begins and it is “The right sort for such a night.”
Later that night,
“What I saw made my blood freeze. Whereas before there had been a blank, now a figure was in the room and close to the window. The lamp was to one side of him and its beam was thrown onto his face, and the effect was startling like that of the Venetian picture….it was the expression on the face at the window that had the impact upon me and produced such a violent reaction…it was a fine depiction of decadence, of greed and depravity, of malice and loathing, of every sort of inhuman feeling and intent. The eyes were piercing and intense, the mouth full and sardonic, the whole face set into a sneer of arrogance and concupiscence. It was a mesmerizingly unpleasant face and it had repelled me in the picture as much as it horrified me now.”
I’ve quoted these passages to show that Hill is a poet. Her words create an enticing and well-seasoned mystery, and the hours spent reading her The Man in The Picture were pure pleasure.
I’d love to spend a vacation in a set of rooms, with a fire always burning comfortably in the grate (through no work of my own) eating good food (again, not of my own making) and drinking good wine, and sharing deep conversations and a true tale of mystery with an old friend. This novel brought me there and I enjoyed myself as thoroughly as if I’d made the trip. But then, of course, I had. I was an armchair traveler, not only to a place but to a mood. I was not The Man in the Picture, but just a woman caught for a little while in this marvelous little book written by Susan Hill.
