I’m The King of the Castle

Synopsis

‘I didn’t want you to come here.’ So says the note that the boy Edmund Hooper passes to Charles Kingshaw upon his arrival at Warings. But young Kingshaw and his mother have come to live with Hooper and his father in the ugly, isolated Victorian house for good. To Hooper, Kingshaw is an intruder, a boy to be subtly persecuted, and Kingshaw finds that even the most ordinary object can be turned by Hooper into a source of terror. In Hang Wood their roles are briefly reversed, but Kingshaw knows Hooper will never let him be. Kingshaw cannot win, not in the last resort. He knows it, and so does Hooper. And the worst is still to come … This extraordinary, evocative novel boils over with the terrors of childhood and is a chilling portrayal of childhood cruelty and persecution, of parental blindness and of our own ambivalence to what are supposed to be the happiest days of our lives.

Author Biography

Novelist, children’s writer and playwright Susan (Elizabeth) Hill was born in Scarborough, England, on 5 February 1942. Her first novel, The Enclosure, was published in 1961 when she was still a student. She worked as a freelance journalist between 1963 and 1968, publishing her third novel, Gentleman and Ladies, in 1968. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1972 and was a presenter of BBC Radio 4’s ‘Bookshelf’ from 1986 to 1987. In 1996 she started her own publishing company, Long Barn Books, editing and publishing a quarterly literary journal, Books and Company, in 1998.
She won a Somerset Maugham Award for I’m the King of the Castle; the Whitbread Novel Award for The Bird of Night; and the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Albatross, a collection of short stories. Her recent books include, The Various Haunts of Men, Pure in Heart, and The Risk of Darkness, from a series of books about the adventures of Detective Chief Inspector Simon Serailler. The Man who Turned into a Picture is a classic ghost story in the tradition of The Woman in Black.