The Woman In Black - Chapters 9-12 TOO MUCH SCARY!!!

DID I SAY IN THE LAST POST THAT THIS WASN'T SCARY ENOUGH??? SUSAN HILL OBVIOUSLY SAVED ALL THAT IS HORRIFIC, TERRIFYING AND DEVASTATING FOR THE FINAL FOUR CHAPTERS BECAUSE I WAS FLIPPING SCARED!!!! I take back my words from yesterday. I could NOT BEGIN TO IMAGINE what lay in store for me!! How do I begin?

Arthur returns to Eel Marsh House the next morning and surprisingly spends a whole day there completely unharmed by any supernatural beings. HOWEVER that night he is woken by Spider the dog growling at the door. He could hear a noise coming from down the hall which he recognised but couldn’t quite identify. I thought this was particularly good in increasing the tension, because not knowing what was down the corridor, relying on Arthur to describe the sound, and not being able to hear it ourselves was very powerful as it forced us to focus on what Arthur was saying, rather than if we were watching the film we’d be trying to work out what the sound was ourselves.

The sound is coming from a room which Arthur passed earlier and which he knows has a locked door. He slowly creeps up to it, building the tension by describing this sound as something from his childhood which he knew should be perfectly innocent but in this case would be perfectly terrifying if he could only work out what it was. This was interesting, as so many horror films use things related to children and make them absolutely terrifying: children's voices singing nursery rhymes, dolls (which actually were written about by Freud, explaining why they can be so scary), clowns etc. He approaches the door and cannot open it, but still hears the sound. He returns to his room and attempts to sleep, knowing again that there is someone or something else in the house with him.

The next thing that's important is that next day he continures sorting through Mrs Drablow's papers (that's what he was supposed to do from the start) and discovers letters sent from someone called J to Alice Drablow, who obviously had a baby out of marriage and whose parents are forcing her to give it away. She doesn't want to but eventually gives it to Alice and there are papers of adoption along with these letters. Previously Arthur had found a grave with a name on it that started with J, so she obviously died here. Also, remember that child in the pony trap? Well Arthur heard that same noise again the night before, so it's obviously not human, and can I just say now that I INSTANTLY thought of a theory: THIS J PERSON IS THE WOMAN IN BLACK, SHE GAVE UP HER CHILD TO ALICE DRABLOW, THE CHILD DROWNED ON THE MARSHES, AND WHEN SHE FOUND OUT SHE DIED TOO. That is what I came up with.

Ok so later he hears this strange sound again, and he thinks he realises what it is. He walks slowly along the corridor and up to the door and - THE DOOR IS FLIPPING OPEN!!! DJFSE;HAEKESH HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?? I AM NOW SCARED FOREVER!!! Inside is A NURSERY, which is scary in every way because it's preserved as though there's a child still living there, even though they died years ago, and THE ROCKING CHAIR IN THE CORNER IS ROCKING!!!! There's no one there, it's described as though someone has just left, but WTF? Man I was scared.

That night there's a storm (wow that's original) and Arthur opens his bedroom door to venture out into the corridor, but he can sort of sense another being just walking past him. Hold me whilst I cry with fear please :[ Then there's a power cut so he's in total darkness  - :O - so he can't do anything/go anywhere so he goes back to bed. When he re-awakes at dawn he decides for some reason to go outside for a walk, and Spider runs off across the marshes, no doubt trying to escape that awful place. BUT he gets stuck and starts being PULLED UNDER and Arthur tries to save him and IT'S NEARLY THE MOST HORRIBLE BIT OF THE WHOLE BOOK but then they get free, Arthur faints and then wakes up under the care of Samuel Daily who came to rescue him. PHEW!  I can breathe again.

After that there's the whole explanation thing going on, and I was 100% RIGHT ABOUT MY THEORY! Only thing is that Jennet was Mrs Drablow's sister. But then Daily says the worst thing in the entire history of horror books. Every time The Woman is sighted a child dies. It is her revenge for her child dying and no one can escape from it. But this time no child seems to have died. Maybe the 'curse' is broken.

Arthur returns to London and marries Stella, his fiance who we never met previously. He begins to put the pastbehind him and they have a child and everything is happy. Then one day they're all out and the child begs to go on a carriage ride in a park. He and Stella go on board and move off. Arthur sees in the distance The Woman. She walks up to the horse pulling the carriage and scares it. The horse rears and the carriage is upturned. Stella and the boy die.

And I finally understand why Arthur reacted the way he did when asked to tell a ghost story at the beginning of the book, because not only were his experiences terrifying, but his later happiness was completely ruined by this avenging ghost who cannot bear to see anyone with something she lost. I really was not prepared.

The Woman In Black - Chapters 5-8 Not Enough Creepy

Sorry it's been so long - I was away for Easter with no access to the internet, but I have a lot of reviews from all the reading I did and so prepare to be bombarded with posts today!

I will start at the very beginning (Chapter 5 anyway), and I am pleased to say that it was definitely creepy. He goes off to Eel Marsh House after the funeral and (I may have mentioned this last time) is told that he can only access it when the tide's right... convenient. The guy taking him, Keckwick, states that he will return later to pick him up, refusing to leave him there which, you have to agree sounds worrying. So Arthur goes for a walk around the grounds and of course goes over to the graveyard, I mean why wouldn't you? That's not tempting fate at all is it? He sees the Woman again and has this inexplicable feeling of terror, runs away and locks himself inside the house. This book has so many gothic conventions it feels like it should have been written in the Nineteenth Century!

Of course, this is when it gets creepier. As the day wears on a thick, suffocating mist descendson the house and Arthur cannot see anything through the window. This obviously means that there is no way Keckwick can come and pick him up, and he's now trapped in this house with the likelihood of a ghost being nearby =S He goes outside, trying to walk back to the village instead, but nearly falls in the marshes and gets stuck, but THEN he hears this strange sound of a pony and trap and then the cry of a young child and the sound of the carriage falling and being sucked under, the child's and an adult's voices screaming the whole time. Arthur can't see anything at all, and this worked really well, making it feel claustrophobic and blind. He manages to get back to the house, but can't help the people and is left with the knowledge of their death. Keckwick comes later to save him and take him back to the inn.

So the next few chapters didn’t have that much happening. It was mainly him recovering from the terrors of the night before. After arriving in the Inn, he refused to go anywhere near Eel Marsh house ever again. Of course, the next morning he feels differently and, completely ignoring how petrified he had been the night before, he decides that he will go back again. Only this time he’s not so keen to go alone and asks around, but of course no one wants to because they’re sensible and pretty terrified of that place – although we still don’t know why.

Why is it that people like Arthur Kipps refuse to take the hints of people who know what’s going on and instead go gallivanting around trying to look impressive and then epically fail? (Don’t you just love the word gallivanting?) So anyway, after asking around about getting someone to help, he writes to his boss, updating him, and then gets insanely excited about a bike ride. Yes. A bike ride. Maybe it’s just because I used to cycle to school every day for seven years and really hated it, but I really didn’t understand his enthusiasm. I mean seriously, it’s just a bike! Then he stops of and gets excited about having some bread and cheese. This is another thing about people in books who go on journeys: all they ever seem to eat is bread and cheese. Look it up – they never bring anything else, no fruit, no meat, just bread and cheese. It’s in Heidi and Eragon and the Belgariad books. If I was having a bike ride and stopped at a pub, I would make sure to eat more than bread and cheese. Ok rant over!

He comes back, has supper with a man he met on the train, who again warns him against going back, but Arthur, stubborn as he evidently is, insists. The man therefore lends him a dog called Spider to take with him as company/protection.

As you can see I don’t have much to say except summarise what happened. I have to say that nothing important seemed to happen in these chapters, but I might just be missing something. There hasn't really been much creepiness in this book so far - I expected more after everything I'd heard from it, but hopefully it's get better as I go on.

The Woman In Black - Susan Hill - Chapters 1-4 Smells Fishy

Woo ok so onward to the next book, now that's exciting! Sort of, anyway yeah so The Woman In Black by Susan Hill. Does anyone know when this is set, because I always thought of it as Victorian, but there was this one line where the narrator referred to the Victorians/19th Century so it must be later than that. I didn't realise it was written in 1983 either - I assumed it was wriiten around the time of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, but apparently not. Moving swiftly on... I chose this book because I've heard the stage show in London's really good, and also Daniel Radcliffe is going to be in a film of it so I thought it would be good to read it first... see how I relate everything to Harry Potter? Oh good grief I actually am obsessed aren't I?

So we start at the end, when the narrator, a man named Arthur Kipps, is a few years older (not quite sure how old, but I got the sense that he was maybe in his fifties?) and it's obvious that this memory of something awful in his past still plagues him. He's asked to tell a ghost story and practically wets himself, running out of the room and not returning until hours later. Overreaction much? I'll have to wait and see what actually happens, but this did seem a tad melodramatic. He alludes to this awful past and decides to write it down - presumably so he doesn't have to physically talk  about it.

So then we go back into his past, delving into his memory (bit like a pensieve? OH MY GOSH STOP MAKING THESE CONNECTIONS!) Anywaaay he's sent to attend the funeral of a Mrs Alice Drablow and he gets on a train and tells us in detail about the train and the journey which I didn't particularly like because, with exception to HP7, I don't really like reading about long journeys. But he does discover something very fishy, and that's people's reaction when he mentions Mrs Drablow's name. She seems to have been some kind of ominous presence because they all look shifty and change the subject/stop talking altogether. Hmm. Something supernatural taking place at her house involving a woman who wears black? We studied the gothic genre of 19th century novels in Year 12, and I found it really interesting, so hopefully there'll be some of that here.

So Mr Kipps arrives in the village and is told that Mrs Drablow's house is on this sort of island thing so he has to wait for the tide to be right in order to get in there. Or out. Convenient. He's staying in an Inn, eats lots of food, talks to some men who get nervous when he mentions Mrs Drablow, and then finally goes to the funeral.

It's not until the funeral in Chapter 4 that we meet who I presume is the mysterious Woman in Black. Mysterious is certainly the word anyway. It seems that he's the only one who sees her - making me think she's supernatural or something. He describes her like this:
"The skin, and, it seemed, only the thinnest layer of flesh, was taughtly stretched and stained across her bones, so that it gleamed with a curious, blue-white sheen, and her eyes seemed sunken back into her head"
He says lots more like this and she does seem quite creepy, but then when he points her out to his colleague, Mr Jerome, he nearly faints right there and is absolutely terrified. Strange...

That's all I've read so far, and I think it was quite a slow start - nothing much happened, but I'm keeping an open mind because I've heard such good stuff about it. Anyhoo I'll keep reading and do another review in a few days!