Review: "Printer's Devil Court" by Susan Hill

HILL, Susan, “Printer’s Devil Court – A Ghost Story”, Profile Books Ltd., London, 2014.

Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine-titling; 106pp., with several monochrome illustrations. Gilt titled and embossed dustwrapper. Near fine.

M.R. James had a particular party trick that he could pull off on demand: someone would nominate a time period prior to their current one (late Victorian into the Edwardian Era), and Montague Rhodes James could write a passage in the idiom of that time. Flawlessly. He could write like a Medieval English monk, or a country squire from the 1700s, or an Tudor dandy from 1580. It meant that whenever he wrote a ghost story set in the past, or dealing with texts from distant ages, they rang absolutely true. H.P. Lovecraft could do this too, although his results were more instinctive, because he eschewed the idiom of his own time for something that he felt far more comfortable with – the writing style of Edgar Allan Poe’s generation.

It’s tricky to get that degree of familiarity with the writing style of a bygone age such that it seems perfectly real. It requires a lot of time spent immersing oneself in that technique and it’s a real high-wire act to get it right: if there’s even a breath of a misstep, the whole thing falls very, very flat.

A friend threw this book at me and said that “if I liked M.R. James, I will really like this”. That’s a Hell of an assumption on his part, but I can see where he’s coming from. I do like M.R. James; a lot. What I don’t like is stuff that tries to be M.R. James but ends up being pastiche. I zipped my way through this – it’s only 106 pages long after all – and left the exercise with mixed feelings. First, it’s a ghost story – that’s a bonus; second, it reads very much like an M.R. James ghost story but it doesn’t quite hit the mark; third, I saw the twist coming a mile away – never a good look, especially for me! Fourth, most of the difficulties are, in fact, not the fault of the author!

Let me explain. We live in a strange period in the history of publishing; things are turning over to electronic formats and soon the book as we know it will cease to be produced. In the meantime though, just as it was when the printing press was beginning to make an impact, book production is going through the roof. More books are being produced now than at any other time on the planet. The sad fact is, that most of the books that are currently being made are crap. Nowadays, people want a book that won’t end: marketing models which heretofore were used to manage the production of TV shows and movies are being used as models to pump out print media. This means that people are being taught to not look for quality, but rather continuation. People nowadays don’t want “good”; they want “more”.

This is why E.L. James can write four volumes of dreck like the 50 Shades of Grey series, despite the fact that there’s no editorial input, and make enough on the project to then write the same four books again, but from the point of view of one of the other characters. Once the floodgates were opened and the marketing types pushed the hype, no-one cared any longer what they were reading, just as long as it kept on coming. For the same reason we get TV shows that outstay their welcome, Man Booker prize-winners whose works are more like telephone books (with just as much unnecessary filler), and even classic, mainstay books that are being re-written (my god!) by new authors for a modern audience. (Seriously, be careful the next time you pick up a new copy of Northanger Abbey – it might well have been written by Val McDermid!)

It’s part of the need to distract ourselves that has become a hallmark of modern life. There are too many of us, and things are getting pretty dire. However, no-one wants, or is able, to find a way forward. The easy answer, therefore, is to bury our heads and ignore it.

What this means for Susan Hill’s little book therefore (and I’m not being patronising here; it’s a short story, puffed up to be something else; a promotional piece), is that it’s all flash and no substance. It does the piece – and the author – a disservice. Let’s take it from the top.

First, this is pastiche – there’s no sugar-coating it. It feels like an M.R. James story – sort of – but there are pieces of text that leap off the page and blow the illusion right out of the water. It’s the odd turn of phrase that rings untrue; a repeated word; a sentence that looks like it’s heading somewhere and – Oh look! A birdie! The sad fact is that these moments are not necessarily the fault of the author – they are editorial typos, mistakes made by the typesetters and proof-readers in the course of rushing this baby to the bookstores.

Second, the story is an obvious one. I’m wondering if the masterminds behind this release gave Ms. Hill the time to prepare a piece at all. “Don’t worry,” they probably said, “just grab any old thing from your ‘working’ tray and we’ll smooth it out for this promotional jag”. This tale is probably not truly representative of what she’s capable of producing; I wonder if Susan Hill wishes she could have offered them something a bit better instead?

Let me explain a bit here: I can never see a twist coming. In movies when all my friends are groaning and rolling their eyes, I’m the one sitting there saying “what? What?” “The Sixth Sense” hit me like a train: ‘didn’t see it coming. Same with “Unbreakable”. And that’s just M. Night Shyamalan’s oeuvre. (The one time I did spot the twist en approche, was “The Crying Game” – I wonder what that says about me?) Anyway, this story was literally an open book to me from the first word. And I don’t think it’s because I spend so much time with this kind of stuff – I just think it’s not that clever a twist.

Third – the production. This is a short story, not a whole book. It has been produced – with all the bells and whistles – to encourage sales and to heighten the author’s profile in the cutthroat market that is today’s book industry. If this had been a collection of stories, or a novel, it would have been a justifiable exercise; as it is, it looks like something hefty, but comes off as a lightweight effort. The reader is at first intrigued by all the gilt and hardcover expense, but, 106 pages later, the little balloon goes pop! And you’re left with a novel-sized short story taking up valuable space in your bookshelf.

I know I haven’t touched upon the matter of the story at all in this overview – if I did, there would be no point in you even looking it out for a read. All that I can say about the effort is that Susan Hill must be feeling very ill-served by her publisher. I can’t blame her if she is.

Three tentacled horrors