Tag: Susan Hill

I’m the King of the Castle by Susan Hill

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

I read I’m the King of the Castle by Susan Hill for the 1970 Club hosted by Simon and Karen.

Description from Amazon UK for the Mass Market paperback edition published in 2014:

‘Some people are coming here today, now you will have a companion.’

But young Edmund Hooper doesn’t want anyone else in Warings, the rambling Victorian house he shares with his widowed father. Nevertheless Charles Kingshaw and his mother are soon installed and Edmund sets about persecuting his fearful new playmate.

From the dusty back rooms of Warings through the gloomy labyrinth of Hang Wood to the very top of Leydell Castle, Edmund pursues Charles, the balance of power slipping back and forth between bully and victim. With their parents oblivious, the situation speeds towards a crisis…

Darkly claustrophobic and morally ambiguous, Susan Hill weaves a classic tale of cruelty, power, and the dangerous games we play as children.

It is a depressing, tragic, heart-rending story about 11 year-old Charles Kingshaw’s misery and torture when he and his mother Helena, went to live at Warings, the home of Joseph Hooper and his bully of a son, Edmund, also aged 11. It’s well written, with well defined characters and I could easily visualise the setting, but I can’t say I enjoyed it. There is that awful sense of foreboding all the way through.

I really disliked Edmund who took great delight in terrorising Charles. As for the parents I was shocked at their behaviour and attitudes. Mrs Kingshaw is oblivious to what is going on between the boys and how much Charles fears Edmund. Charles is a sensitive boy, but smart and resourceful. He decides to run away, but Edmund follows him into Hang Wood and they lose their way. Charles can cope, but Edmund falls to pieces, cries like a baby, and injures himself falling into a stream. However, after the adults rescue them and they return to Warings Charles succumbs again to Edmund’s bullying, dominated by his cruelty. Things come to a climax when they all visit a ruined castle, where Charles is really the ‘King of the Castle’ and Edmund falls off a high wall. There is no way that all will end well. It reminded me of that sense of impending tragedy in The Lord of the Flies. It’s disturbing, dark and violent. The ending was inevitable and totally tragic.

I’ve had this book for a long time and can’t remember when or where I bought it, nor why I haven’t read it before now. My copy is a secondhand hardback published by Longman in 1970. The Introduction clarifies that Susan Hill wrote the book for adults. It’s a chilling novel that explores the extremes of childhood cruelty.

I’m the King of the Castle: Book Beginnings & The Friday 56

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

I’m featuring I’m the King of the Castle by Susan Hill, a book I’ve just started to read. I don’t know when I acquired it, but it must have been over 20 years ago. It’s a secondhand hardback book, published in 1970 by Hamish Hamilton. And the reason I’ve eventually got round to reading it is because it is just right for The 1970 Club with Simon and Kaggsy during the 14th- 20th October.

Chapter One:

Three months ago , his grandmother died, and then they had moved to this house.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, but she is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. You grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

‘He wrote home, ‘I like it here very much, it is smashing here.’

‘He is a brave little boy, Mrs Helena Kingshaw had said, reading the letter, and weeping a little.

At St Vincent’s School, Kingshaw said, ‘let me stay here for ever and ever.

Description from Amazon UK for the Mass Market paperback edition published in 2014

‘Some people are coming here today, now you will have a companion.’

But young Edmund Hooper doesn’t want anyone else in Warings, the large and rambling Victorian house he shares with his widowed father. Nevertheless Charles Kingshaw and his mother are soon installed and Hooper sets about subtly persecuting the fearful new arrival.

In the woods, Charles fights back but he knows that his rival will always win the affections of the adults – and that worse is still to come . . .

I’m the King of the Castle by Susan Hill is a chilling novel that explores the extremes of childhood cruelty. What do you think, does this book appeal to you? What are you currently reading?

Library Books – December 2023

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

These are the books I have on loan from my local library:

Daphne Du Maurier and her sisters : the hidden lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing by Jane Dunn.The Du Mauriers – three beautiful, successful and rebellious sisters, whose lives were bound in a family drama that inspired Angela and Daphne’s best novels. Much has been written about Daphne but here the hidden lives of the sisters are revealed in a riveting group biography. The sisters are considered side by side, as they were in life, three sisters who grew up during the 20th century in the glamorous hothouse of a theatrical family dominated by a charismatic and powerful father. This family dynamic reveals the hidden lives of Piffy, Bird & Bing, full of social non-conformity, love, rivalry and compulsive make-believe, their lives as psychologically complex as a Daphne du Maurier novel.

Politics on the edge : a memoir from within by Rory Stewart. Over the course of a decade from 2010, Rory Stewart went from being a political outsider to standing for prime minister – before being sacked from a Conservative Party that he had come to barely recognise. Tackling ministerial briefs on flood response and prison violence, engaging with conflict and poverty abroad as a foreign minister, and Brexit as a Cabinet minister, Stewart learned first-hand how profoundly hollow and inadequate our democracy and government had become. Cronyism, ignorance and sheer incompetence ran rampant. Around him, individual politicians laid the foundations for the political and economic chaos of today. Stewart emerged battered but with a profound affection for his constituency of Penrith and the Border, and a deep direct insight into the era of populism and global conflict. This book invites us into the mind of one of the most interesting actors on the British political stage.

In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill. After just a year of close, loving marriage, Ruth has been widowed. Her beloved husband, Ben, has been killed in a tragic accident and Ruth is left suddenly and totally bereft. Unable to share her sorrow and grief with Ben’s family, who are dealing with their pain in their own way, Ruth becomes increasingly isolated, hiding herself in her cottage in the countryside as the seasons change around her. Only Ben’s young brother is able to reach out beyond his own grief to offer Ruth the compassion which might reclaim her from her own devastating unhappiness.

I’d love to know if you’ve read any of these books and if so what did you think? If you haven’t, do any of them tempt you?

Dolly by Susan Hill

Published on by Margaret1 Comment

Dolly

Profile Books|October 2012|153 pages|Library book|4*

Dolly: A Ghost Story is a small book – in size and in length and I read it very quickly. Although I think it is a supernatural tale I don’t think it is a ghost story. But it does have an uneasy foreboding and melancholic atmosphere, mainly set in a mysterious isolated country house in the Fens.

There is not much to say about it really. It’s the story of two children, cousins Edward and Leonora who spend a summer with their Aunt Kestrel at her house, Iyot Lock, a large decaying house in the Fens. Edward tries to get on with Leonora, an insufferably mean and spiteful child. Expecting a birthday present of a doll from her aunt, she has a tantrum when she is given a baby doll totally unlike the doll she wanted and breaks its head. From that point on strange things begin to happen with disastrous consequences.

It is well written and I relished the descriptive writing of the landscape, that oppressive feeling that the sky above is falling in on you that I’ve experienced in that area. The tension is there from the start and it gradually builds as events unfold and the storm clouds gather.  There are hints of evil as well as spite and malice, in Leonora and what happens to the doll and the cousins is where the supernatural element comes in. 

But I think the plot is too formulaic and I could easily foretell what was going to happen. To say what it reminded me of would be too much of a spoiler. The ending, as so often in short stories and novellas comes too quickly, but nevertheless I did enjoy reading it. There is a certain satisfaction in predicting what would happen and being right as opposed to getting to the end and expecting more. It made a pleasurable change as it filled a gap between longer and more demanding books.

Reading challenge: Virtual Mount TBR as it is a library book.

Library Loans

Published on by Margaret18 Comments

Here are some of my current library books

Lib bks July 2019

  • Dolly by Susan Hill, sub-titled ‘A Ghost Story’, a novella set in the Fens where two young cousins, Leonora and Edward spend a summer at Iyot Lock, a large decaying house, with their ageing aunt.  I’ll be writing more about this book soon.
  • Journey to Munich by Jacqueline Winspear, a Maisie Dobbs novel. This is no. 12 in the series (I’m not reading them in order). This one is set in 1938 when Molly travels into the heart of Nazi Germany.
  • The Trip to Jerusalem: an Elizabethan Mystery by Edward Marston, the 3rd book in the Nicholas Bracewell series about a troupe of players travelling England – not  to Jerusalem but to an ancient inn called The Trip to Jerusalem – whilst the Black Plague rages.
  • The Last Dance and other stories by Victoria Hislop. Ten stories set in Greece, described on the book cover as ‘bittersweet tales of love and loyalty, of separation and reconciliation’. I’ve recently enjoyed reading her latest book, Those Who Are Loved, also set in Greece, so my eye was drawn to this book.

The library van used to visit here once a fortnight, but now it only comes once a month. I hope it continues coming, but I fear that its days are numbered, so I make sure I use it whilst I still can.

Printer’s Devil Court by Susan Hill

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

Printer's Devil Court

A short while ago I quoted the opening paragraph and an extract from page 56 of this novella in one of My Friday posts. I was hoping Printer’s Devil Court by Susan Hill would live up to the promise of its blurb of a chilling ghost story.

Blurb (Amazon)

A chilling ghost story by the author of The Woman in Black.

One murky November evening after a satisfying meal in their Fleet Street lodgings, a conversation between four medical students takes a curious turn and Hugh is initiated into a dark secret. In the cellar of their narrow lodgings in Printer’s Devil Court and a little used mortuary in a subterranean annex of the hospital, they have begun to interfere with death itself, in shadowy experiments beyond the realms of medical ethics. They call on Hugh to witness an event both extraordinary and terrifying.

Years later, Hugh has occasion to return to his student digs and the familiar surroundings resurrect peculiar and unpleasant memories of these unnatural events, the true horror of which only slowly becomes apparent.

Sadly, I don’t think it does live up to the blurb. I think it’s well written, but I didn’t find it chilling, although it does have a great sense of melancholy. Susan Hill is very good at setting the scene, although at times I was under the impression that this was set in Victorian times, especially as the illustrations give it a Dickensian feel. But in this scene when Hugh returns to London forty years later this is what he records :

… this corner of London had changed a good deal. Fleet Street no longer housed the hot-metal presses and many of the old alleys and courts had long gone, most of them bombed to smithereens by the Blitz. (page 68)

So, it’s not set in Victorian times, but in the 20th century.

Hugh is a junior doctor and shares his lodgings with three other medical students, Walter, Rafe and James and the story begins one evening as Walter asks what they all think about the story of raising Lazarus from the dead. It turns out that he and Rafe have been experimenting with the possibility of capturing the last breath and want Hugh to be a witness to what they find. From that point on  I could see almost exactly where the story was heading – it is too predictable.

It’s really a very short story padded out with several pages of illustrations, divided into three parts with an introductory letter, Postscript and Hugh’s Final Pages with blank pages between each section. Maybe, I wouldn’t have been so disappointed with this book if I hadn’t just read Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s and three of his short stories at the end of that book, which I think are excellent.

  • Hardcover, 105 pages
  • Published September 25th 2014 by Profile Books Ltd (first published October 14th 2013)
  • Source: Library Book