Robert Aickman, perhaps the greatest English writer of supernatural fiction, more than once expressed the view that the ghost story as a form was analogous to poetry. What he was getting at is that it is delicate, shaded, requires a deal of sensitivity from the writer, and has many competing elements that have to be in balance in order for the thing to work at all.
If this is true, then Susan Hill's first ghost story, The Woman in Black, is by now akin to Wordsworth's "Daffodils" – having entered into the popular imagination in a way no other piece of its genre has since A Christmas Carol. Its theatrical version is still running in London's West End after 23 years, and it's about to be made into a 3D movie.
The Small Hand, Hill's fourth supernatural tale, eschews period and adopts a contemporary setting – albeit a musty one. Its protagonist Adam Snow is a dealer in rare and antiquarian books, as were many of MR James's leading men. But this is no mere homage: Hill is too fine a writer for that.
Snow is on his way back from visiting some wealthy clients when he gets lost driving around narrow country lanes. He takes a wrong turn and discovers a dilapidated, seemingly abandoned country house. Drawn by curiosity – or something darker – he gets out of his car and goes to explore the overgrown gardens which, according to a rotting and broken sign, were once open to the public. Standing there, surveying the decay and desolation, Snow feels a small hand creeping into his own: "It felt cool and its fingers curled themselves trustingly into my palm and rested there, and the small thumb and forefinger tucked my own thumb between them." There is, of course, no child there. Snow is quite alone.
And thus a haunting begins, but unusually it's not tied to its initial location. The small hand creeps more and more often into Snow's, and what starts as a relatively benign phenomenon becomes increasingly alarming and dreadful.
This central phenomenon is reminiscent of one of the most frightening moments in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, where the unfortunate Eleanor Vance, searching for comfort as she lies terrified in the dark, thinks she's clutching the hand of her roommate – only to discover that the roommate is several feet away on the other side of the room. The original and singular detail is a mark of most great ghost stories. It's a snare for the imagination, and when described as clearly and cleanly as it is here it's hard not to think "what would that be like?" (The answer is, "not very nice".)
As the story continues it accumulates an air of creeping dread. And worse, one becomes aware of a pervading existential chill lurking behind the surface allure of Snow's crisply prosperous life. Where is his family? His relationships? The comfort of intimate connection?
The all-important atmosphere is beautifully evoked – the rundown Edwardian house, an isolated French monastery, the moments of haunting themselves. But what's most impressive is what hangs between the spare lines of Hill's precise prose – particularly in the book's denouement. Ultimately, this is a wonderful piece of storytelling that does what a good story ought to do: it keeps you guessing, pulls you in. And when the climax comes, the explanation and the source of the haunting are not what you think at all. You really don't see it coming.
Perhaps most unexpected is the feeling of contemporary resonance that the reader is left with. Hill has spoken in interviews about her dark fascination with recent cases of child murder and, without giving anything away, there's more than a hint of James Bulger and other latterday nightmares in the final revelation. Consequently, The Small Hand articulates something about sin that's often lost in all the tabloid shouting – about how easily it spreads out from its perpetrators, blighting the lives of all around, and most important, how inescapable are its consequences. The ghost story is an intensely moral form, and one of its most interesting aspects is the alchemy it allows, enabling a writer to render the horrors of life with a strange, icy beauty. Such horrors are easier looked at askance, particularly when, as Susan Hill rightly reminds us, the monstrous is closer to home than we dare admit.
Ghost Stories by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman is playing at the Duke of York's theatre in London.
