Surprisingly, Adam Snow doesn’t feel spooked in a horrid way by this sensation, in fact he rather likes it, and wishes he could feel it again. He is strangely drawn to the house and then,Īs I stood I felt a small hand creep into my right one, as if a child had come up beside me in the dimness and taken hold of it. The story is narrated by Adam Snow, an antiquarian bookseller, who gets lost on a winding country road and ends up by a derelict house. And perhaps that kind of tension and thrill counts as being scary in its own way. But it only took ten pages or so to get me completely gripped, longing to know what would happen next, where the eerie ghostly grip of the hand would take me. In other words I wasn’t expecting to find it particularly scary.Īnd I’m not sure that it was scary in a gory, terrifying, panic-inducing way. So I read The Small Hand with a certain naïve scepticism. I’m not sure that I’ve ever read a proper ghost story, other than The Turn of the Screw and a few various gothic moments that have incidentally come my way via bits and pieces of literature. It would be weird to feel too spine-tinglingly chilly in the heat of summer, whereas now it would be forgiven for prompting another cup of tea or making one draw a little closer to the fire. It was a choice based on the feeling that a ghost story was the right sort of thing to read in winter. Last week I read The Small Hand by Susan Hill.
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