Ghost Story Late at Night

I dragged through yesterday because I’d stayed up late the night before, finishing Susan Hill’s novel The Woman in Black.  I’d planned to get to bed at a decent hour but made the mistake of turning one page too many and, as so often happens in cases such as this,  all was lost. I couldn’t stop reading until I’d turned the last page.

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Image by Derek Harper [CC-BY-SA-2.0]

I first heard of The Woman in Black from Kate Shrewsday, who said in a blog post,

“Susan Hill, a masterly ghost story teller, uses the nursery as the very epicentre of her masterly tale. An old house has unhappy history with tragic death at its centre. And those who died had lives which circulated about the nursery.”

The description sounded promising, so–after nearly six months of alternately remembering and forgetting–I got my hands on the book. It’s masterly, all right, a ghost story whose horror increases after the book has been returned to the shelf.

Now I’ll drag through tomorrow because of an inconvenient compulsion to post tonight. I’m probably already in hot water, because I have to be up and out before daylight, and my cousin Mary Veazey, the bossy one–you might remember her as the one who fell asleep while I was reading aloud the latest installment of my novel–well, anyway, she told me three hours ago to pack my suitcase and go to bed. I said I would but I didn’t.

Well, it’s too late to do anything about that now. Pun intended.

Before I get to the suitcase part, however, I’ll take a couple of minutes to link to a video of a little girl talking to a 911 operator about her father, who is having a heart attack. It has a happy ending. You may have seen it already–I’m usually the last one to discover such things–but if you haven’t, enjoy.

Related Articles

• The Woman In Black (mnorth52.wordpress.com)
• Shadow Chasing Shadow (kathywaller1.com)
• The Vows of Silence (prayerwalkerwiththee.wordpress.com)