Martyn Waites

The fully authorised chilling sequel to Susan Hill's bestselling ghost-story, The Woman in Black, released in 2012 as a film featuring Daniel Radcliffe. This is the book the follow-up film starring Jeremy Irvine (War Horse) and Phoebe Fox will be based on. Autumn 1940, World War Two. Bombs are raining down, destroying the cities of Britain. The evacuations begin, and soon children are being taken to the country for safety. Teacher Eve Parkins is in charge of one such group. The children are scared and Eve does her best to calm them, but the truth is that she too is haunted by a personal tragedy she cannot put behind her. Their destination is Eel Marsh House. Desolate and forlorn, it is situated on a causeway and is sinking into the treacherous tidal marshes that surround it. Far from home and with no alternative, Eve and the children move in. But soon it becomes apparent that there is someone else in the house with them, someone Eve can't see but who is far more deadly than any number of German bombs ... The Woman in Black.

Angel of Death

The Woman in Black

Alexandra Gillgrass

After reading and seeing the first installment of this series, 'The Woman In Black' by Susan Hill it's fair to say that I had pretty high hopes for this book. While I had heard that the second film was something of a flop I was still convinced that the book would be different.

I think it's easy to slate this book and rip it to absolute shreds, but I think it had so many things against it that it was kind of doomed from the very beginning. For starters, the author is different. Initially, I had no problem with this, but it made me compare Susan Hill's book with Martyn Waites' and Hill's book won on almost every account. Another thing which did not help this book was that the film was not received well. As I haven't seen the film I can't really comment on it, but after reading this book it's made things a lot clearer as to why it was not successful.

That is not to say that there weren't good points about this book! First and foremost, it was really easy to read and I flew through it quite quickly. This is a great book if you love ghost stories, but ones that aren't completely terrifying, it definitely didn't keep me from sleeping. Also great if you're easing yourself into the ghost story genre gently. 

But, ultimately for me there were a few things that weren't great about this book. I genuinely liked the characters but not one of them was developed enough for me, and I found myself wanting to get more of a sense of who these people actually were, these people weren't jumping from the page as they did with Hill's. Another thing which was also quite frustrating was the storyline. Waites gave himself a really great foundation for a potentially terrifying ghost story but just failed in seeing it through. He could have gone in so many directions with this story, there were so many other angles which could have been explored, but to me it just seemed a bit cliche, and basically a less impressive tale of 'The Woman In Black'. 

Not disastrous, but by no means a triumph.

The Woman in Black Angel of Death

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