In my opinion, a good ghost story is difficult to pull off. Too often, the story veers off into lurid gore, overdone camp, or worse, sheer boredom. Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black succeeds where so many others fail, writing a truly frightening tale of a haunting in the remote northern reaches of England in the early 20th century.

Arthur Kipps, middle-aged and living with his second wife and her children, revisits his youth when, as a young solicitor (apparently a dangerous job for British males, at least in novels), he is sent to the village of Crythin Gifford to oversee the processing of an elderly widow’s estate. Strange things begin happening, a malevolent woman in black appears, and Kipps is drawn into a terrifying experience that reaches far beyond the village.

This was a story that had me having to force myself to keep my eyes on the page I was reading, resisting the urge to skip ahead just to end the anxiety and dread each bump, each scream, each murky mist brought to my mind. Hill’s ominous foreshadowing begins from the very first pages, giving the reader a old-fashioned ghost story that had enough atmosphere and chills in an understated horror novel that doesn’t disappoint. The comparisons to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House are apt and well-deserved.