The Small Hand & Dolly

Starred review from August 5, 2013
Spiritual malignance stemming from tragic pasts casts sinister nets of revelation and despair in two subtle, intelligent, and shocking modern ghost stories from Hill (The Woman in Black). These poetic and emotionally painful nightmares lay waste to the claim that the ghost story is dead and buried. In “The Small Hand,” antiquarian bookseller Adam Snow visits the grounds of a derelict house, where a small, cold hand grasps his own. Urging him to self-annihilation, this wrathful spirit leads Adam to unravel an ancient crime that may involve his own family. In “Dolly,” a future classic of the genre, Edward Cayley returns to his late Aunt Kestrel’s Iyot House, where a moldering china doll weeps in a churchyard. Rage culminates in tragedy as a simple toy soiled by a child’s hatred visits revenge on the innocent. Hill’s unemotional style envelopes the uncanny in prosaic realism, and her suggestive approach achieves superb uneasiness. Unresolved moral complexities bedevil victims in an unjust universe where decency is no protection from evil. Hill’s characters are haunted by conscience and insecurity as well as specters. Fear aficionados take note: these pleasing terrors shatter nerves with a whisper, not a scream.

September 1, 2013
Versatile, prolific, and polished British writer Hill presents two elegantly constructed ghost stories. Each evokes vengeful spirits relentlessly haunting the bleak English countryside in the wake of impulsive childhood wickedness. Hill further accentuates the malevolent persistence of the past by creating protagonists who are connoisseurs of history. In The Small Hand, Adam, a self-possessed, urbane antiquarian bookseller, is on his way to see a client when he stops to explore an estate that has fallen into ruin. There a small hand takes hold of him, as though an invisible child has placed its hand in his. Even when his quest for a Shakespeare first folio leads him to a remote French monastery, the insistent, increasingly alarming small hand follows. In Dolly, Edward, an architectural conservationist, returns to the scene of a stormy boyhood summer spent with his willful, wildly unhappy cousin, Leonora. Slowly he discerns, to his horror, that her violent ingratitude may have appalling repercussions. Steeped in folklore, Hill's supremely atmospheric and utterly unnerving tales of otherworldly retribution lead us deep into the dark labyrinth of the psyche.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)