Customer Reviews

There Are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union: A Novella and Five Stories

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I'm glad I had this introduction to this excellent storyteller. The title piece, Reginald Hill's depiction of life and criminology (and the paranormal) in the USSR, was excellently composed, as were all the other tales in this collection. I was particularly impressed with his story about the harsh basic training instructor who was preparing troops for the impending Somme campaign of World War One (to this day the bloodiest battle in history, 60,000 British troops died in the first few hours of the assaults). The seemingly cruel little corporal is revealed at the end as a being of far greater compassion than his resentful (and most likely doomed) platoon ever realizes. And the send-up of Jane Austen was first-class satire cloaked in the garb of a murder mystery. The death of the odious villain in this wide-open whodunnit is probably singular in all of literature. Reginald Hill knew what he was doing when he composed this anthology. He knew how to write and he knew how to tell the kind of story that keeps a reader rapt.