Tips and Resources From Your Susan Hill Book Club Friends:

From Gothic horror to crime fiction, Susan Hill’s adult works are known for their nuanced explorations of humanity’s darker aspects. “I don’t really do jolly. I don’t know why, I just don’t,” she remarked in an interview with The Guardian.

Hill turned to writing ghost stories after observing a decline in the genre. “I wrote ghost stories because I’d always enjoyed reading them and they seemed to be fizzling out … I don’t take them terribly seriously. It’s like a cake, with ingredients,” she explained. Despite her perspective on the genre, The Woman in Black is now considered a modern classic of supernatural fiction and she has written dozens of other ghost stories to wide acclaim.

Her Simon Serrailler mystery series is also very popular. Her crime fiction books are “where I look at the world as it is.” She told The Overlook Press that her aim with the series “was to look at issues in the world around me and contemporary life – which I have not done in my novels before. I also wanted to know not ‘who dunnit’ but much more importantly, WHY? What motivates a criminal? Why does someone murder and perhaps not only once?”