Diane Setterfield may well be the victim of her own success. Her first novel, the eminently readable The Thirteenth Tale, was an atmospheric, brooding piece of fiction that has set an unfortunately high bar for the sort of supernatural noir that comprises Bellman and Black. The misfortune comes into play not because Bellman and Black is a poorly written novel, but instead because the very fact of having a predecessor invites instant comparisons ... and The Thirteenth Tale is just a much better book.

At the age of 11, William Bellman manages to kill a rook with a next-to-impossible throw from a sling-shot. What would likely otherwise have been just another instance of thoughtless cruelty from a child (hardly surprising) kicks off a series of tragedies, losses and back-handed success that eventually not just informs but subsumes his entire life.

And it’s a very successful life. Bellman grows up as an adoptive heir to a sort of “we get by” textile mill that he eventually turns into a runaway success story. Smart and hard-working (almost aggravatingly so), his life seems nothing short of blessed. He strikes business deals that multiply his riches almost exponentially; falls in love with and marries a wonderful woman with whom he has equally wonderful children; his “rival” to the mill, a cousin with less interest in mills than in collecting art across Europe, happily gives up his claims to the business with nary a squeak; competitors roll over like particularly docile Labradors and practically beg him to take over their businesses ... about a quarter of the way through the novel, readers may wonder what sort of plot device short of a Biblical Job story is going to provide any dramatic tension to Bellman’s life.

Which is when it all starts. Quietly, faintly, “things” start to happen. Not very many things, admittedly; in fact, it’s really just one thing. Death starts stalking Bellman. One by one, everyone close to him starts shuffling off this mortal coil, until finally Bellman is driven to the point of making a deal with a mysterious stranger. Clearly, this is never a good idea, especially when the other party involved is a stranger in black who Bellman has only ever seen in the distance at the multitude of funerals that he has been attending. You would think that striking a deal with a man in black amidst gravestones in a churchyard is a particularly stupid sort of thing to do, especially when it’s done by a man who’s clearly otherwise got himself sorted. But it’s a measure of Setterfield’s quiet, relatively discreet fiction that we understand how desperate Bellman has become, when, in order to save his daughter’s life, he makes his Faustian bargain with a stranger whom we are given to understand, is the eponymous “Black” of the novel’s title.

The agreement between Bellman and Black is never really made clear, but as the novel progresses, we begin to see how the spectre of death has started to take over Bellman’s very existence. He throws himself into a business venture — the only thing that he seems to be intimate with are the workings of the Victorian economics of mourning — gradually beginning to distance himself more and more from the very person whose life he was trying to save. This is of course ironic in a really sad sort of way, as Setterfield takes a delicate ginsu knife to the motivations of a man who, driven by the desire to have someone live, finds himself inextricably ensconced in the entrapments of mourning, giving himself over to (at the risk of cliché) a living death of sorts.

Where Bellman and Black suffers somewhat is in Setterfield’s slightly unsettling desire to deeply and thoroughly detail every single aspect of the Industrial Revolution and the Venn diagram it forms with that era’s predilection towards ritualising and fetishising the process of grief. There were points at which I was skimming past pages and pages of descriptions of black fabric and rather vapid bank managers who see the opportunity for profit in said fabrics; I’m sure Setterfield had written beautiful descriptions of clothing shades and hues, but I can’t remember a particular instance of them ... because there are so blasted many. Similarly, we spend a lot of time on how wonderfully productive and successful Bellman is without really getting a chance to understand how the people to whom he matters are reacting to his growing obsession. There is lip service paid to his emotional drift, but unlike The Thirteenth Tale, it doesn’t quite manage to strike any emotional chords.

This is not meant to be a “damned by faint praise” sort of review, because Setterfield has written a perfectly adequate novel with just enough spookiness and eery happenstance that makes it easy to read. If you’re a newcomer to her fiction, fantastic. You’ll probably like this. But don’t go into it fooled by the misleading hint that it’s a ghost-story (as the title would have you believe). It’s more a morality tale than anything, one that weighs the values of earthly, material success against the intangible wealth inherent in compassion, thoughtfulness and love. You can probably figure out for yourself what the outcomes of that sort of stack-up are bound to be.

Bellman and Black

(NOVEL)

By Diane Setterfield

Simon & Schuster, US

ISBN 147671195X

336pp.