The child is not there

The ghost story is a literary form that favours brevity. Its particular emotional effects — the delicious unease it creates, the shapeless menace and the unsettling uncertainty — work particularly well in concentration, as both Henry James and M. R. James knew so well. A ghost story does not need distractions.

Susan Hill has already established herself as a distinguished modern exponent of the genre with The Woman in Black and The Man in the Picture. She returns to it in her latest novel — or, rather, novella, The Small Hand. It is set firmly in the present, in a world with emails and trips to New York; but, as so often with a ghost story, it is also full of echoes from the past.

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Adam Snow, the possibly unreliable narrator, is an antiquarian bookseller. One summer evening, he loses his way in the Sussex lanes and stumbles into the ruined garden of an apparently derelict Edwardian house. In the gathering dusk, a small child briefly takes his hand in a way suggesting that Adam is an adult whom the child trusts implicitly. The hand feels unmistakably real. But the child is not there.

The entire narrative unrolls like a carpet from this one moment at the end of the first chapter. In its impact, the carefully constructed episode recalls the point in W. W. Jacobs’ classic ghost story when the disembodied monkey’s paw writhes in the hand of the man that holds it.

Adam is drawn back to the garden, which, a generation earlier, had been a showplace of garden design, and which Adam himself and his family had visited when he was a schoolboy. The woman who owned it is still alive, as decayed as the garden, and equally marred by tragedy.