Susan Hill's The Woman in Black is a Victorian Gothic novel as any written at that time. The landscape the story is set in is so convincingly Gothic that I keep having to check if the novel was really written in 1983.
The story is set somewhere in the middle of England called Crythin Gifford. A young London solicitor has to go up there to attend the funeral of Mrs. Alice Drablow. He also has to evaluate her property and her papers. Her house is set in a very eerie landscape in the middle of Marshlands. A pony and trap can make the crossing twice a day and for the rest of the time the house is unreachable. It goes without saying that this house is haunted.
It's passage like this that remind me of my English classes back at university when we spoke about Gothic novels:
"Could I not be free of it at least for that blessed time, was there no way of keeping the memory, and the effects it had upon me, at least temporarily? And then, standing among the trunks of the fruit trees, silver-grey in the moonlight, I recalled that the way to banish an old ghost that continues its hauntings is to exorcise it." (Hill 19)
And he does this by writing a book about it, which is not something that we see any more in modern horror fiction, but it's something so necessary in a good horror novel, I think. This is because it lets the people experiencing the story tell us, which is a much stronger story than told from a third-person perspective.
The horror sequences actually work when read, which I didn't think could be done any more after films made sure we need to see everything worse and scarier for us to feel anything. In this novel, a short walk through the hallway can be quite unsettling. Especially when there is a strange noise coming from the door ahead.....
"They asked for my story. I have told it. Enough." (Hill 128)
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