The Turn of the Screw (Thornes Classic Novels)

Paperback, 175 pages

English language

Published Oct. 8, 1996 by Trans-Atlantic Publications.

ISBN:
978-0-7487-2424-6
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4 stars (4 reviews)

The Turn of the Screw tells of a young governess sent to a country house to take charge of two orphans, Miles and Flora. Unsettled by a sense of intense evil within the house, she soon becomes obsessed with the belief that malevolent forces are stalking the children in her care.

47 editions

reviewed The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Communication is scary

5 stars

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 prose is scary

1 star

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 …

Review of 'Otra vuelta de tuerca' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I once (somewhere on Goodreads) observed that a lot of what is usually labelled Science Fiction is really Engineering Fiction. There are rare examples of Mathematics Fiction (e.g. Flatland, Abbott or Eon, Greg Bear). There's a lot of Physics Fiction and Biology Fiction. Le Guin wrote Anthropolgy Fiction. Imagine my surprise when recently in Ballard's autobiography he said that he favoured Psychology Fiction. This struck me as the perfect pithy description of what Ballard was doing most of the time in his short stories.

This collection has many interesting and surprising stories and the odd few that are actually predictable if you know his work fairly well. Many of the most memorable have the common setting of Vermillion Sands, a fading, no longer fashionable beach resort for the rich and famous that exists - somewhere. It's not quite our Earth, but not apparently an alien world, despite the flying rays …

Review of 'The Turn of the Screw (Penguin Popular Classics)' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Thomas Hardy described James' sentences as "infinite." I thought, yeah right! That's good coming from you! Then I started reading what has to be one of the most famous ghost stories in the English language and found that if anything, Hardy was understating matters...

Having once got from the framing story to the main narrative, the reader is treated to the tale of a woman who can read not portentous but, with a random confusing clause put in just to keep you on your toes, moral and intentional depths, depths which - deep as they are - are not as vertiginous as they will be, when the next clause comes along just to tax your parsing skills, and the most divine beauties betray this to no others even though they have much greater, almost vastly superior, knowledge of the angelic orphans but these are merely working class servants who, however …

Subjects

  • Classic fiction
  • English literature: fiction texts
  • English literature: literary criticism
  • Horror & ghost stories, chillers
  • Fiction - General
  • English
  • Literary Criticism
  • Literary
  • For National Curriculum Key Stage 4 & GCSE