Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Bookish News: Daniel Radcliffe in Woman in Black

Daniel Radcliffe will star in the film adaptation of Susan Hill's The Woman in Black.  I'm a huge Harry Potter fan and I thought he was great as Rudyard Kipling's son in My Boy JackIn The Woman in Black, Radcliffe is a young lawyer who travels to an old house in a remote UK village to review the papers of a deceased client. Check out the descripton of the book below for more details. I've added the book to my TBR list...how 'bout you?

Published in 1983, The Woman in Black was Susan Hill's first ghost story. Read about her process of writing the book on her website.  Susan's latest book The Small Hand, published by Profile Books, will release this September.


  
Some cover love for The Woman in Black


The Woman in Black book description from Amazon:
What real reader does not yearn, somewhere in the recesses of his or her heart, for a really literate, first-class thriller - one that chills the body with foreboding of dark deeds to come, but warms the soul with perceptions and language at once astute and vivid? In other words, a ghost story by Jane Austen.

Austen we cannot, alas, give you, but Susan Hill's remarkable Woman In Black comes as close as the late twentieth century is likely to provide. Set on the obligatory English moor, on an isolated causeway, the story has as its hero one Arthur Kipps, an up-and-coming young solicitor who has come north to attend the funeral and settle the estate of Mrs. Alice Drablow of Eel Marsh House. The routine formalities he anticipates give way to a tumble of events and secrets more sinister and terrifying than any nightmare: the rocking chair in the nursery of the deserted Eel Marsh House, the eerie sound of pony and trap, a child's scream in the fog, and, most dreadfully, and for Kipps most tragically, the woman in black.

The Woman In Black is both a brilliant exercise in atmosphere and controlled horror and a delicious spine-tingler - proof positive that that neglected genre, the ghost story, isn't dead after all.

P.S. Radcliffe is also starring in the film remake of Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front, due out in Spring 2012.

1 comment:

  1. I just read "Woman in Black". It was very atmospheric, and fairly creepy but not as frightening as I had hoped. Not on the par with novels by Daphne Du Maurier or Mary Stewart (who were my favorites when I was young) but worth the read. You might get out of it more than I did. I think it will make a good movie and Daniel Radcliffe seems perfect for the role of the lead character.

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