Oct 1 2008
The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill
Ever have that need to reassert your independence? To act so that you feel like you aren’t controlled by 
circumstances even if it isn’t always the smart thing to do?
Why all this philosophical questioning? Well, it has to do with being in the local library and looking for books even though you TBR piles is gigantic and you are behind on your reviews. Yes, I checked out a book and started reading it immediately because to do otherwise would be to acknowledge that I am the prisoner of my lists; that I can only read what has been chosen – even by myself.
But I picked out a short book just to be safe: The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill. As is my custom, allow Publishers Weekly to supply the plot description:
Hill (The Woman in Black) crafts an old-school spooker in this atmospheric tale of a sinister painting imbued with the vengeful spirit of a former owner. The painting, owned by retired Cambridge don Theo Parmitter, catches the eye of a visiting former student who’s intrigued by its depiction of an 18th-century Venetian carnival scene and a figure in the foreground who looks anachronistically modern. The student’s questions extract from Theo the strange story of how he won it at auction and the even stranger tale of the bidder he beat . . .
(the above is truncated to avoid spoilers)
The Man in the Picture is really an old fashioned ghost story. The terror is communicated by atmosphere and imagination rather than by graphic violence or danger. Hill also uses set characters and style to build a traditional ghostly tale.
Whether you enjoy it or not has a lot to do with whether you have an appreciation for that style and the skill it takes to successfully create a story within that genre. I am somewhat torn. It is a short work and certainly a well written one. And I can appreciate the skill Hill brings to a tricky job. But in the end I didn’t find the work all that creepy or unnerving. It never quite pulled me into the story. Perhaps if I had been reading it all in one sitting on a dark and stormy night the mood would have struck me, but reading it in bed over the course of a couple of nights it did not.
I am not a good judge of these things, however, as I am not really a fan or horror or other related styles. For some other opinions that might involve spoilers read below. Keep Reading
