Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

As a lifelong horror fan who found her niche in gothic haunted mansion stories in adulthood, I’m almost embarrassed to say that I hadn’t gotten around to reading this cornerstone novella yet. It’s been on my list for years, and I had already been planning on finally reading it in time for Halloween, but the release of Netflix� The Haunting of Bly Manor (loosely based on this seminal work, and perfectly splendid), made me get to it sooner than intended.

What a disappointment it was. I’m quite sure that I would’ve enjoyed the story in someone else’s hands, but James� verbose writing was a complete deal-breaker for me. I don’t know how much of it is turn-of-the-century convention, and how much his personal style, but the convoluted yet choppy sentences were maddening to me. I found myself reading whole pages without having absorbed anything at all, only to re-read and find that there was, in fact, nothing of substance to be extracted from the endlessly long paragraphs. In theory, such vagueness certainly works in this particular story’s favor, and as such it probably was a deliberate choice on the author’s part, but I found that it was overdone and ultimately counter-productive to any feeling of creepiness or suspense. The screw kept on turning, but it didn’t tighten.

The story centers around a young governess who arrives at Bly, a country home in Essex, to care for Miles and Flora, two young, wealthy, orphaned children. The tale is told from the governess� perspective, who, in the introductory framing story, is said to have since died. She begins seeing the figure of a man and woman around the grounds—the previous governess who died by suicide, and another former employee, it turns out. She becomes convinced not only that the specters are haunting the grounds of Bly, but that both children are secretly aware of it.

The Turn of the Screw has kept readers guessing for over a century, and it is this ambiguity that was its saving grace for me; if it hadn’t been for that, it would’ve gotten a single star—is it a straight-forward ghost story, or is it all in the governess� head? Perhaps my modern eyes read too much into it, but I also had the feeling that child molestation was strongly implied. In any case, the reason this is considered such a classic is the long-standing, heated debate of ghosts VS insanity it has sparked, but personally, I think that trying to solve the ambiguity one way or the other would just detract from the one thing the novella does well: Confuse and manipulate the reader.