English author Susan Hill is best known for the gothic novel The Woman in Black. I'm the King of the Castle was published in 1970, and tells the story of two young boys Edmund and Charles, whose relationship is toxic at best and borders on the sociopathic, their baiting of each other reminiscent of the way in which the boys in William Golding's Lord of the Flies also behaved. As in many of her novels, the children in this novel have an alarming capacity for bullying and seem to have little to no conscience about the trouble they cause. I'm the King of the Castle reaches its climax when one of the boys commits suicide, whilst the other, feigning sorrow and distress, feels a secret sense of triumph.
In 1989, the novel was adapted for the big screen in France, and was released as Je suis le seigneur du chateau; however, it has been Hill's classic ghost story, The Woman in Black, that has been more easily, and frequently, adapted for both film and television audiences, and it is also one of the longest running plays still performed in London's West End. Hill has expressed a passion for traditional ghost stories and the way in which the suspense builds until a plot twist, or an inevitable conclusion, comes at the end.
In 2004, Hill made a sideways move to crime fiction with the creation of Detective Simon Serrailler, and penned a series of twelve novels and short stories following his murder-solving career.
Hill was awarded the Somerset Maugham Award in 1971 for I'm the King of the Castle, and was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1972 for The Bird of Night, a novel for which she also received the Whitbread Novel Award. She was given a CBE by the Queen in 2012 for her contribution to literature.
