I also think Spider the dog causes suspense especially when the events happen in the house.
‘I realised that Spider was up and standing at the door, every hair of her body was on end, her ears were pricked, her tail erect, the whole of her tense, as if ready to spring’ (107)
here you can see the reaction of Spider as she stands frightened of whatever there was in the house and in other places too e.g. ‘ I could feel the tension in her limbs and body and it answered to my own’(109) here the first person narrative is explaining the feelings of Arthur and the dog of what they were experiencing at the time and as u ca see they were both frightened and were expecting something to happen, the dog in particular releases a lot of suspense as we know dogs have more sensing ability than humans and as Susan Hill shows the dog was sensing something behind the door Arthur couldn’t open. Susan Hill also releases suspense in the way she explains the weird noises.
‘There was something in that room I could not get to it, nor would I dare to if I could, I told myself it was a trapped bird or rat’ (109)
Much as the sounds seem normal to Arthur thus the sounds come to symbolise the appearance of a ghost but Arthur has difficulty understanding that.
Mr Jerome releases quite a lot of suspense as Mr Jerome and Arthur talk about the family of Mrs Drablow and herself.
‘Is there a family grave?’ He was silent for a moment, glancing at me closely again, trying to discover wither there was any meaning behind the apparent straight forwardness of the question’.
There again you can see Susan Hill giving of suspense in her characters, every time the name of Mrs Drablow is mentioned to anyone of Crythin Grifford and the way he tries to hide the truth form Arthur. Susan Hill uses a lot of suspense in the way she explains the weather Arthur experiences in the area of Eel Marsh House.
‘I felt confused, teased by it, as though it was made up of millions of live fingers that crept over me. (73
There Arthur is explaining the weather he experienced outside Eel Marsh House the first person narrative is saying, as if the weather was the ghost creeping onto Arthur, the first person causes slight suspense and tension and when Arthur says to himself ‘I had fallen under some kind of spell’ (92) the house seems to bring Arthur towards itself and every time the fog has appeared in the story suspense and tension is caused.
The way Mr Keckwick reacts when he finds Arthur after he had a shock.
‘That he was fully aware of my state he knew something had happened to me and was quite unsurprised, was clear, and his manner also told me unmistakably that he wish not to hear what it, was, to ask at all or answer question to discuss the business’. (80, 81)
Here Mr Keckwick does clearly not want to talk about Arthur’s experience in the house because he knew what was wrong with the house and Mrs Drablow and because of this scene Susan Hill creates plenty of suspense in her characters.
Every time the pony and trap is mentioned in the story something seems to go wrong
Causing suspense.
‘But I began to suspect the pony and trap that I heard out on the marsh, the pony and trap with the child who cried out so terribly and which had been sucked into the quicksand’. (81)
This was a terrible scene when the pony and trap suddenly appear and has a horrible scene, giving off lots of suspense for further on in the story, and when the old lady? Appears ‘the woman with the pale wasted face. By the grave of Mrs Drablow’ (82). The old woman makes you think is she the ghost or not, especially the way Susan Hill describes her, therefore causing suspense. And here again ‘I could not see, only sense her dark presence, hovered the woman’ (83) here again the woman appears in Arthur’s thoughts here you can see the woman will be the main subject in the story. Later on in the story when Arthur enters the locked room which he tried opening at his first visit to the house.
‘In the way only such chair will continue to rock for a time after someone ahs just got out of it. But no one had been there the room had been empty.
Here you can see Arthur was seeing ghostly things, things moving but no one there creating great suspense and tension and fear for Arthur and again when the woman appears at the window.
‘The sight of the Woman In Black at the nursery window’. (133)
Here The Woman In Black appears from nowhere giving Arthur a scare; it also gives of suspense because of her appearance.
And near the end of the book the words ‘pony and trap’ (158) appear in this part you clearly no something is going to happen and you can work out something is going to happen to Arthur and something does happen to his wife and kid something really brutal. They both have a brutal accident while they were on the pony and trap and they both die. Susan Hill finishes her book in suspense because in most ghost stories the ghost near the end disappears or becomes free and everything becomes normal but in Susan Hills story you don’t know if the ghost disappears or snot or if it carries on haunting the people of Crythin Grifford, this finishes the book of on a high taste of suspense even with its brutal ending.
