The Travelling Bag and other Ghostly Stories - Susan Hill

After last year's stinker Printer's Devil Court, I thought Susan Hill had lost her craft as a writer. I was surprised to see yet another entry in her roster of annual ghost stories and having received a copy for Christmas, decided to give her one last chance. It is well that I did, for her latest book is a considerable improvement, at least, two of the four stories are. This time, Hill turns her attention to the tried and tested formula of the short story, which seems to work better with the genre. After all, it's very difficult to maintain an atmosphere of fear across a longer piece. The first story treads her familiar Victorian setting and is a psychic investigator's experience dealing with a mysterious death. It concerns a moth phobia, and there really is nothing more to it than that! The second story is also weak, about a lonely boy who seems to have a ghostly companion. It goes nowhere and the drama hinges exclusively on a spooky headcount during a school trip.

The last two stories manage to save the book from being another write-off. 'Alice Baker' is about a mysterious new office worker with a lingering scent of decay abound her. The plot itself is very simple, but the manner in which it is told and the unease generated is arguably of similar quality to what Hill accomplished in her celebrated The Woman in Black. (I wonder if it's possible to write a Susan Hill book review without mentioning this title?) I went to sleep that night genuinely unsettled. The last story is even scarier and managed to instill a sense of very real dread long after reading. 'The Front Room', perhaps one of my favourite Susan Hill tales to date, is about a devoutly religious family whose well-meaning attempt at charity backfires in a dreadful way. After converting their living room into an annex for the husband's evil stepmother, the nasty old woman develops a horrifying vendetta towards their three young children, which persists even after her death. Some parts of it reminded me a lot of my childhood experiences! It's not perfect writing, but it did what ghost stories often fail to do - it scared me.

Rating: 4/5