Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39916 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-11
• Binding: Hardcover
• 145 pages

Synopsis
A mysterious depiction of masked revellers at the Venice carnival hangs in the college rooms of Oliver's old professor in Cambridge. On this cold winter's night, its eerie secret is revealed by the ageing don. The dark art of the Venetian scene, instead of imitating life, has the power to entrap it. To stare into the painting is to play dangerously with the unseen demons it hides, and become the victim of its macabre beauty...

Customer Reviews

Elegant but not her best
I am a great admirer of Susan Hill's work, and this short novella is as stylishly written as her other work; sadly, though, it doesn't fully measure up to her great chiller "The Woman in Black", or indeed its splendid companion "The Mist in the Mirror". This new story has many elements in common with the earlier works, but its creepy atmosphere isn't sustained so expertly. To be honest, "Man in the Picture" feels a little re-heated, notwithstanding the author's characteristically excellent writing.

no woman in black
I have always seen Hill as a fantastic writer her prose are beautifully written, the ambience of her novels is fantastic. One of her fortais is ghost stories. I used woman in black for my GCSEs and it has made me become a real fan of her work. The man in the picture starts off well, and, she uses her wonderful skills in building up a great premise for the story, unfortunatly, the reverance of the woman in black appears to be overlooking this story a great deal and it does have tones of it embedded in this novel. I wont reveal the ending but it is simmilar to the woman in black. Not that its a bad thing as it is a great ghost story, but what could have been a great idea has not fully been taken with this project. I would say give it a go though as it is well written, the characters are well formed and if your a Hill fan you will enjoy it.

Pointless pastichery...
*Sigh*. This book has really annoyed me. It is a very slight tale indeed and yet retails at a gargantuan £9.99! (Good job I borrowed it from the library instead!) This smacks of exploitation of Woman in Black's legions of fans. Not having read that esteemed tome yet, nor seen a stage version, I can't comment on whether The Man in the Picture is a dip in form or more of the same from Hill.
On the plus side, Hill shows she is quite competent in apeing the style and subject matter of M.R. James. And while I can begrudgingly accept that he was a pioneer of this type of fiction, I have to say I'm left quite cold by his stories. (Not in a spine-tingling way!) I much prefer Bram Stoker's novels or Dickens' ghost stories for olde-worlde chills.
So, yes, despite having some storytelling facility, Hill squanders it on a story with very little originality, stock characters and less fear factor than your average episode of Buffy or Scooby Doo! The lazy plotting, the Miss Havishamesque character of the nonogenarian Countess and the generous smattering of cliche throughout this story really aren't good enough. (Incidentally, Stephen King's latest Duma Key - which happens to revolve around the horror of art among other things - also has a Havishamesque character, but at least her backstory is well fleshed-out and genuinely disturbing.)
Supernatural fiction has evolved into a far more subtle and surprising and interesting and multi-layered beast these days compared to the Victorian exponents of the genre. Check out the novels of Phil Rickman or Stephen King (of course) or early Clive Barker or Koji Suzuki or even James Herbert to be truly frightened. And the almost 40-year-old Exorcist by William Peter Blatty is a far, far superior slice of literary horror than this trifling effort by Susan Hill.