He is a man firmly grounded in reason and rather lacking in imagination. Adam’s attitude to most things is one of habitual restraint, and he doesn’t seem to talk about anything with unabashed enthusiasm except books and libraries, though even these instances are not as marked as they would be in a more extroverted person. In The Small Hand, we’re consequently perfectly convinced that we’re dealing with plain old upper English middle class Adam Snow, antique book dealer. Hill is especially good at writing convincingly about ordinary, unexceptional people, and much of this is to do with her highly developed command of narrative voice.

Add some ghastly nightmares and hallucinations, a brother incarcerated in an asylum for a year and a grand old house that was once the toast of the kingdom, and you have classic Susan Hill dynamite in a little package that can be read in two hours. That’s before the small hand begins to pull him towards cliff edges and pools, demonstrating an apparently malevolent urge to ensure Adam’s departure from this world through suicide. Adam recalls the incident with fondness and determines to go back to the White House and to explore its past. Drawn to the place by some inexplicable force, Adam soon jumps out of his skin at the feeling of a child’s small, cool hand taking his a ghostly gesture that seems to have no intention but a benign one perhaps the greeting of another human being by a spirit long left to itself. It is on his way to pay a visit to a rich client in the country that antique book dealer Adam Snow first encounters the White House, a derelict mansion with an enormous, overgrown garden that bears signs of a glorious past. Most of these qualities, however effective they were in making The Woman in Black so iconic, tend to turn The Small Hand into a small incidental more admirable for the technical mastery of its narrative than for its ability to shock, the latter being something we can, not unnecessarily, consider indispensable in a novella subtitled A Ghost Story. ‘Something more horrible’ then ends in an abrupt sort of deus ex machina that restores calm and normality, before Hill rolls out her horrifying pièce de résistance and we end the novella in a complete panic with our hands over our mouths. Much like its illustrious predecessor The Woman in Black, Susan Hill’s The Small Hand gives us a rational, mildly religious narrator whose initial spine-chilling experience takes an age to develop into something more horrible as his everyday life and his own reason delay him in delving into what he has experienced.

The small hand by susan hill