If you like reading Ghost Stories try this one out!!

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Written in 1983, by Susan Hill, 'The Woman in Black' is a short ghost story about a menacing ghost that haunts a small English town. Although only about twenty five years old, the book is now something of a classic in its genre.It has been adapted into a stage play, been broadcast as a radio play and was also made into a TV movie in 1989. It is one of those books that you can read again and again, and you still look under the bed and in the wardrobe before you go to bed!! Do you like a ghost story? Do you like a GOOD ghost story? Then this book is a definite one for you. This is the sort of ghost story that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. I've read books that have been described as a' spine chiller', that have done nothing for me; but this tiny 160 page book grips you slowly, gradually, cleverly and in beautifully written words as you read in suspense and anticipation, with quick glances around the room, for fear you are not wholly alone. This reads like a true Victorian gothic tale, and starts on Christmas Eve. It was a Victorian tradition to tell ghost stories at night in the winter, and especially on Christmas Eve. This was what was happening in the Kipps' home, Arthur Kipps is sat with his stepchildren as they tell spooky ghost stories. When he is urged to tell one he quickly replies that he does not know any. In fact though he does, but his is no story, his is a true tale; a tale that is far too appalling to recount around the Yuletide fireside. Kipps decides to write his story down, in the hope that by doing so he will be able to rid himself of the dreadful memories of that time decades before. And so dear reader, the true story begins - a beautifully told story full of dark gothic atmosphere, wonderful descriptions and one that will haunt you forever. Alice Drablow spent the last years of her life living as a recluse at Eel Marsh House she had no friends and no family, so that when she died there were no grieving relatives to mourn her. Eel March House is the very essence of any house you would want in a ghost story of this type. Positioned on an island accessible only by a narrow and treacherous path called Nine Lives Causeway, a causeway that is covered for all but a few hours a day by water and surrounded by desolate, eerie marshlands. Arthur Kipps was a young and ambitious London solicitor, and he was sent by his firm of solicitors, of whom Mrs Drablow was a former client, to the village of Crythin Gifford, where she had lived, to be their representative at her funeral and to sort out any paperwork at Eel Marsh House. Arthur soon realises that whenever he mentions the name of Alice, the local people respond with strange looks and silences; it doesn't take him long to realise that realizes that there is some sort of superstition that surrounds Alice and her home. When Arthur asks the local lawyer who the mourner he had seen at the funeral was, a woman who seemed to be suffering from a wasting disease and who was dressed in an old-fashioned black dress and bonnet, he cannot understand the panic that this question instils in the lawyer. And so our young and imprudently persistent protagonist sets off to spend a few days (and worst still nights) sorting out Alice's documents by himself in the isolated house in the dark, eerie, foggy and damp setting. Come on, would you? I'd have run a mile, but then we wouldn't have this remarkable little book. So back to the story, switch on the lights and lock the door - you may not be alone!!! There was a huge amount of papers for Arthur to sort through, and as he does so he also discovers a family tragedy; and worse, he begins to come across it in a supernatural form. Arthur runs, but in the clear light of day he brushes away his fears and puts it down to the mist covered darkness, he had a job to do and so he returned to the house with the determination to stay until that job was finished. Arthur took supplies, he took a dog and he also took a lack of knowledge of the evil of the woman in black. Arthur though does see the woman in black again, this time she is standing in the decaying family graveyard alongside the house. Arthur can now actually sense the evil that radiates from her. Just who is the woman in black? What was the accident on the causeway, the accident that he can hear being eerily re-enacted in the dark fog that swirls terrifyingly around the house? Just what is it that is making those noises in the locked room at the end of one of the corridors? When Arthur finds the truth of what has only formerly been implied, will he be able to take the consequences, the consequences that change his life forever? The only way that you will find out these answers is by reading this wonderful little book!! My opinion is that the 'The Woman in Black' is an wonderful and chilling , quick read. On top of this it really is a beautiful and well-written story . It contains such incredible descriptions - descriptions of the countryside, the house and the marshes that surround it and the weather. In fact the house and the weather are both rather like two extra characters in the book. At times as I read this book I felt as if I were actually inside the house - vigilantly entering the eerie rooms a candle in hand. I could hear the noises that Arthur could hear, I could feel his fear. Hill has set the story in a non-specific past, there are motorcars and telephones but the feel is certainly more Victorian in feel, it is a gothic, creepy, atmospheric thriller. A good old-fashioned ghost story, no blood and guts, no psychopathic serial killer - but oh so much more!! I would really recommend that you try it.