The Turn of the Screw (Penguin Popular Classics)

This is a ghost story written in 1898. The scariest thing about it is the prose. It's terrifying! Seriously. Stay away!

The thing is hard to untangle. It's written in an archaic writing style, with an excessively wordy backward sentence structure. If I hadn't been working so hard to understand the sentences, I probably would have been able to pay attention to the story.

It's about a governess who is hired by an absentee uncle to watch over his niece and nephew in a gothic house. No gothic house is complete without a ghost. This guy got a bargain when he bought this place. It has two ghosts!

This story commits one of the major sins that I occasionally see in books and (especially) movies. The governess can see the ghosts. The two kids can see the ghosts. They refuse to speak about it! They spend the whole book dancing around the elephant in the room. Who does this? No one! If Adolf Hitler moves into your spare room, do you think no one in the house would mention it? No! Especially if he leaves the bathroom a mess!

This is an unreadable, nonsensical vomitorium. Stay away.

I have John Peters's Speaking into the Air to thank for getting interested in the 19th c American pragmatist camp, so maybe it was inevitable that I'd think the first Henry James I've read was about communication. But I also do think that's the main thing going on in this story. Communication is variously too hard to do, too hard to prevent others from doing, an easy out to be avoided, and/or a mortal danger. Crucially (and again I don't think this is just because I've been writing about the under-coverage of class in Peters's media theory) it's always communication across class difference that causes real terror.

The prose style is, sometimes annoyingly but also compellingly, marked by long strings of short parenthetical phrases; it's often tough to parse, and it aids the impression that the narrator sees words/ideas as chess pieces that all have to be moved in just the right order. I'm curious to read more James and see if that style is particular to this story.

I found this more of a chore than a pleasure to read, and came close to giving up on it several times. I found the unnecessarily long sentences very hard to follow, and it constantly pulled me out of the story. If not for that I might have enjoyed the story, but as it was I was simply glad to get to the end of it. And what an abrupt end it was! Given the 'framing story' style opening, I was expecting a similar closing, and consequently found the ending very jarring.

I'm not sure whether it helped or hindered that I've seen at least one film adaptation of this book in the past, so was already aware of its plot. I'd have to agree with another reviewer, who thought this was one of those cases where the film (at least the version I recall) was preferable to the book.

Not really the Halloween read I was looking for.