Susan Hill knows exactly how to please. This small, smart, elegantly printed little notepad of a book is a delicious Victorian ghost story, nostalgically and expertly comforting.

It opens as smoothly as an M. R. James or Conan Doyle short story, over a good fire in a shadowy room on a winter’s night:

The story was told me by my old friend, Theo Parmitter, as we sat in his college rooms one bitterly cold January night. There were still real fires in those days, the coals brought up by a servant in huge brass scuttles. . . .

We know this room and we know the professor’s story, too. It is the fine old chestnut to roast upon the coals: the story of the haunted painting. Oscar Wilde examined it in The Picture of Dorian Gray and M. R. James in his short story about the painting above an author’s desk where a distant smudge on the landscape grows nearer and clearer until it is revealed as the devil himself. Paintings are favourite repositories of malign power. Even today a crashing portrait is thought to precede a death. Films, especially farces and thrillers, are full of portraits with moving eyes.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP