The Small Hand by Susan Hill

Yeah, this one did n't quite work for me.

So, after trawling Amazon for some good horror to read I came across a book called "The Woman in black" by the same author which seemed very highly rated. I ordered it but unfortunately Amazon have yet to grasp that Super Savery Delivery = next day (or three!) so it did not come in time for the weekend. I ended up getting this out of my local excellent Bar Hill library insted.

It is about a guy who gets lost in his car and ends up at a derelict old house where he seeks directions. There is nobody there to ask but he feels a small hand (of a child) work its way into his and hold him tightly. The rest of the book goes into his return visits, him learnig the history of the house, his travels to buy / sell antique books, his brother's involvement and the return of the feeling of the hand and how it tries to drag him into any nearby mass of water.

Whilst this was a decent enough book, the story it never feels overly novel whilst also never keeping strictly to ground already covered by other authors. However, I found it quite mundane - the pages did not grab at me with the elequence of the writing of other books I have recently (Dan B rown, A&D) and I think I probably would not have bothered with the second half had not been only 169 pages of well-spread text.

Still, I'm not sure when I last read a whole novel in a weekend !