![]() 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. ![]()
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