Bellman & Black: A Ghost Story by Diane Setterfield
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was really drawn into this book and I didn’t want it to end. That’s one of my yardsticks to decide if a book is good or not.
Bellman & Black is called a ghost story but I didn’t even realize that until I was halfway through the book. It didn’t strike me as a ghost story in the traditional sense but it was definitely a haunted story about a man named William Bellman.
When he was a child, he killed a rook with his catapult. That seemed to be the underlying theme throughout the story. William goes on to become the successful owner of a fabric mill and have a lovely family with four children and a wife he loved dearly. Then all of the family, except the oldest daughter Dora, died of fever which many people in the area did.
When it seemed as if Dora would die, too, Will runs into a dark man (whom he comes to refer to as Black) at the cemetery. It seems as if he makes a deal with the devil, Dora recovers, and he becomes successful as the owner of Bellman & Black an emporium where people go for all their needs brought on by a death in the family.
William loses himself into the business and it consumes him. I feel like there may have been a deeper message in this book that I missed but that’s surely not the author’s fault. The writing is beautiful, the descriptions are lovely and, although it’s a dark story subject, I really loved this book.
I look forward to reading Setterfield’s first book, The Thirteenth Tale.