The Small Hand

The Small Hand by Susan Hill is a ghost story but rather than it being scary and mysterious, I found it to be eerie and chilling. The narrator is an antiquarian book dealer that takes a wrong turn while driving home to London one day and finds himself at a run-down and deserted house set amidst an overgrown garden. While wandering there he feels a small hand inserted into his but there is no one there.

Fully meaning to go back to this strange place, he gets side tracked by his life although from time to time he feels the child’s hand gripping his own. He also is overcome with feeling of fear and an urge to harm himself. Does this hand want to lead him into danger? On a business trip to visit an isolated monastery, he experiences an show more incident where he sees a young boy and fearing that his car may have hit him, he pulls over only to feel a force try to steer him over the edge of a steep precipice. Back in England, a train of ghostly events seems to be aimed at both the narrator and his brother.

The small Hand has a very traditional feel to it although it is set in the present. The author excels in creating an atmosphere and delivering a tightly constructed tale that definitely sent chills down my spine. This short book will appeal to lovers of horror fiction as things get more sinister as it goes along and feelings of impending doom are developed. show less

It was a place which had been left to the air and the weather, the wind, the sun, the rabbits and the birds, left to fall gently, sadly into decay, for stones to crack and paths to be obscured and then to disappear, for windowpanes to let in the rain and birds to nest in the roof. Gradually, it would sink in on itself and then into the earth. How old was this house? A hundred years? In another hundred there would be nothing left of it.

I turned. I could barely see ahead now. Whatever the garden, now "closed," had been, nature had taken it back, covered it with blankets of ivy and trailing strands of creeper, thickened it over with weed, sucked the light and the air out of it so that only the toughest plants could grow and in growing show more invade and occupy.

I should go back.

But I wanted to know more.

I feel obligated to say up front that I am probably being unfair to this book. I am tempted to bump it up a star just because.

This is a much better plotted and neatly delivered little ghost story than [b:The Mist in the Mirror|678362|The Mist in the Mirror|Susan Hill|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1420351953s/678362.jpg|664356]. In this tale, she stays with exactly one source of supernatural tension, manifesting almost always in the same single way. The opening chapters made the hair stand up on my arms. The sensation of being lost on country roads, of finding a deserted place, of the small hand. And the book is filled with moments like that, moments I could easily reference real fears from my own experience and let them be drawn forward in the story. (Well, not the small hand. But she makes it seem like something I could experience, and that is the key to real suspense.)

And then the side trail intervenes and the plot is lost. And the side trail isn't just any side trail; it's a totally out of left field wholly unbelievable one. I appreciate the love for books that shines through in the lady's work, but this was just impossible for me. Seriously, I don't care how adverse to dealing with the financials those monks were. The instant they decided to sell a First Folio they would have had ahold of Sotheby's in two seconds flat. Monks aren't stupid. I put the book down for most of a week. The tension drained away. The story and the writing held up when I got back to it, but never recovered from that loss.

So, if Ms. Hill ever writes a book that stays on task, it will scare the jeepers out of me, I already know it. In the meantime, I will continue to wish that she would pare these things down. This one could have lost 50 pages and the whole trip to France and it would have been a very nearly perfect ghost story. If you are more patient than I am (or have fewer hang ups about Shakespeare), you may well enjoy this one quite a lot more.

(Note: read in [b:The Small Hand and Dolly|17288633|The Small Hand and Dolly|Susan Hill|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1369779573s/17288633.jpg|23909819] but I prefer to review the separately published works in omnibus editions unless there is something unique to the omnibus. No such difference here.) show less

Adam Snow, a dealer in antiquarian books, gets lost in the Sussex countryside after a meeting with a client. Driving around to try to get back to the main road, he happens across an abandoned Edwardian house with an overgrown garden. Intrigued, he goes closer, when suddenly he feels a small hand being folded into his own; needless to say, there isn't a child visible anywhere. But this isn't the only time he encounters the ghost child, and subsequent meetings will not feel as peaceful ...

After four fairly disappointing reads by Susan Hill, The Woman in Black of course excepted, I held out high hopes for this novella: a derelict house with nature reclaiming the once beautiful and tended garden, and a ghost child that makes contact by show more taking hold of the main protagonist's hand – how intriguing, I thought. Unfortunately the author gets bogged down in details and pursues a subplot about Adam Snow hunting for a Shakespeare First Folio in the remote mountains in France, and thereby neglects to create an atmosphere suitable to the ghost story medium. The truth is that the story was boring, and the main character's insistence that everything he had experienced was real only fuelled my feeling that it was anything but. Though the scenes at the house and in the garden were atmospheric enough, they gave but a glimpse of what would have been possible in the hands of a more skilled writer, and the anticipation of a neat twist at the end of the tale didn't get fulfilled. My feeling after finishing the book was that a lot of threads didn't come together to be knitted together into a cohesive piece of fiction, and a few ideas just didn't make sense at all to me. Disappointing. show less

Dude goes to the length of living in a monastery for some time just because some child holds his hand.
Talk about fear of commitment.



*

Joking aside, it was a pretty neat modern ghost story, with all the victorian vibes and Hill's tropes of faded memories. Also liked the ending. Fun, creepy ghost story that has you feeling cleansed afterwads.

I read this book at two goes: one session last night and then finished it off this morning while the soup was cooking. I've had a bout of sinusitis and been reading a lot. Not sure what to say about this book. Obviously you're tempted to compare it with The woman in black. It is a slighter book, physically small. It feels old-fashioned really and mentions of the internet and so on seem anomalous, an intrusion. Read at one go, it works. The link between the brothers, the older (guilty?) partner picking up the fatal hand from his brother. In this sense, it is reminiscent of the earlier ghost story where the past intrudes into the present. I think ghost stories are pretty impossible things to write as well as read and therefore this one show more succeeds. But probably only because it has been sealed off from the present world really - can you have a modern ghost story at all, I wonder? show less

Susan Hill is probably best known to Crime Fiction fans for her Chatto and Windus series, but THE SMALL HAND is a ghost story with mysterious overtones which would appeal to anyone who is looking for something which is just simply beautifully written.

A short (and sumptuously packaged) book, THE SMALL HAND is the story of antiquarian bookseller Adam Snow as he takes a wrong-turning one day and stumbles across the derelict old White House deep in rural England. Curiosity draws him towards the house, and the unmistakable sensation of a small hand creeping into his own attracts and intrigues, rather than scares or creeps him out.

Drawn strangely to this house, Snow does a little research, discovering that the owner's grandson drowned there show more many years before, and as he discovers more, he finds that his initial reaction to this small presence becomes more disturbed. Snow starts to experience haunting dreams and panic attacks as the small hand insinuates itself more and more into his life.

It's hard to come away from THE SMALL HAND without an overwhelming feeling of sadness, a palpable melancholy. There is a sense of aloneness about Adam Snow that is mirrored by the presence he encounters in that house. For just the shortest time it almost seems that this is simply two lonely entities that have somehow come together. But there is a gentle building of a real sense of menace in this book, not fed particularly by any mystery, more by an increasing understanding that the past has moved into the present and bought with it a profound sense of inevitability. Saying that these two - the real man and the supernatural presence - are drawn together for a reason isn't really a spoiler as it's obvious very early on. The reason is not that hard to narrow down for a reader looking for a "solution", but what is considerably harder for the reader to come to grips with is the nature of damage and revenge, and the way that the past has been waiting for the present.

The sheer beauty of this compact, beautiful little book is very much the sense of emotion that weaves it's way out of the story and into the reader's conscious. The themes of revenge, retribution, regret and that overwhelming sadness stayed with this reader for a long time after I closed THE SMALL HAND. show less

The small hand is a beautiful, spooky story that, unlike much of Susan Hill's writing in the past two decades reaches the high levels of mystery and suspense in her earlier novel The woman in black. Unlike The woman in black, which strongly evoked the atmosphere of Dickens, The small hand is firmly set in the present, but no less dreamy and haunted.

The small hand should particularly appeal to book lovers, as the main character is an antiquarian book dealer who buys and sells old and rare books. The framework of the story is his hunt for a first edition Shakespeare folio, which takes him to a monastery hidden away in the French Alps. The short novel has beautiful descriptions of English county houses, landscapes and the visit of the show more monastery.

Throughout the novel, the main character is drawn to a derelict garden, a once famous garden now not only forgotten by most people, but also buried deep in the main characters memories. As memories and visions blur and get mixed, doom is near at hand.

The small hand is a gorgeous story for readers who love subtle suspense. show less