It has been said in this paper that Susan Hill is "arguably too versatile for her own good", the point being that she might suffer in the public perception by being able to write, with seemingly equal facility, crime novels, ghost stories, literary fiction and children's fiction. I would argue, though, that there is one strong theme throughout her work: she likes giving people the willies a perfectly respectable aim for a novelist, I have always thought. And how many of her novels contain death, or even open with a death, I wonder?
The Beacon does: with that of matriarch Bertha Prime, not so much a matriarch, really, as a machine for running a household although long before that, it is her daughter May who has been doing that. The Beacon is a lonely northern hilltop farm, gruelling to run; dead sheep being hauled across the frozen earth, you know the drill. "A wind would blow for 10 minutes or half an hour then drop, leaving the Beacon quite silent. At other times it would roar up the hill and settle to hurl round the chimneys and crash the gates for three or four days or more, driving them all mad."
This is the kind of thing Hill loves doing, and does so well: the gothic, atmospheric setting. It is a very grim and spooky set-up, and you might think she is putting in place all the elements for a ghost story, but she's not although there is definitely something haunting about what goes on here.
The farm itself would appear to be not much more than two degrees of wretchedness above that of Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm, only without the laughs. There are four children: spoilt Berenice, stolid Colin, creepy Frank and clever May, who goes to London to study at university (in or around, judging from her birthday, 1960); but, having the poor fortune to be in a Susan Hill novel, she gets the willies and has to return, to look after her eventually widowed mother in the howling isolation. (I am being flippant. Her psychosis is chillingly described. On the underground, for example, "it took the form of extremely thin men without faces who walked sideways and could slide themselves into her body like cards into a pack and talk to her in obscene language. She got out at the next stop and ran, but of course it made no difference, by then they were in place".)
So far, so Hill. But she has had a very clever idea: silent, watchful Frank leaves the Beacon, also to go to London but in his case, he loves it. He gets a job as an office boy, becomes garrulous and popular, rising eventually to run the news desk of "one of the most important national newspapers". And then, for reasons that are never adequately explained, but which form the tantalising void around which this fascinating novella orbits (its Something Nasty in the Woodshed, so to speak), he decides to write what is popularly termed a misery memoir: he describes a childhood where he is regularly beaten and tormented not only by his parents but by his siblings; a routine punishment for him is to be locked, Harry Potter style, in the cupboard under the stairs and indeed, it is this cupboard that gives his book its title. "It took him," we are told, "a much shorter time to write than he had expected."
At which point the ground slips a little under our feet. We know, for the novel has been tacking back and forth from present to past, that no such scenes occurred and yet we find ourselves asking a question which is almost like "or did they?", but is somehow more indefinable. Is Frank's book an act of malice, or something else? We begin to vaguely mistrust the information we have to go on, and what is particularly clever about this is that it is an echo of what people around them, who assume the book is factual, begin to think of the family. (The book and subsequent film are huge successes.)
So, in short, a work of great creepiness and subtle power. It will linger 'orribly in the mind; and it's very short it shows us how much can be packed into a novel by leaving so much out.
