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Average Customer Rating:

Not as extraordinary as I expected

Customer Rating:

Although it is a glimpse into the personal mind more than a horror story and causes the reader to question the sanity of the source of the information, I found it to be uninteresting. Maybe that was unique back then, but not anymore. It also deals with suggestions of taboo subjects such as homosexuality and pedophiles, but only suggestions. I imagine that was unique in its time too. I just found that where some books that leave things unresolved or ambiguous (Calling of Lot 49, for instance) are all the better for it, this one just leaves me feeling that it just didn't work here. I'm not sure why this particular book remains after all these years. That said, it isn't horrible. Just average.

Turn of the Screw Keeps Turning

Customer Rating:

This edition provides provacative notes to assist the reader who is not accustomed to the gothic romance genre. Various critical theories are proposed which stimulate attentive reading. My own reading would lean towards the notion that James is satirizing popular horror stories, while at the same time taking jabs at readers who absorb them. In any case, the novella provokes interesting discussion.

A struggle not worth the effort

Customer Rating:

This is the last time that I let Gil Grissom recommend a book for me. Yes, I let a fictional character from a TV show pick a book for me to read. The story is a fairly simple and uninspired Gothic "horror" story. There are some ghosts who never really do anything and a governess who overreacts to everything. The idea that perhaps the governess is insane and this isn't a simple horror story, in my opinion comes from the fact that it is impossible to justify reading this story without that conundrum. Besides the plot being rather pedestrian is the writing of Henry James. He uses sentences that are confused, confusing, and in many places indecipherable. At 120 pages, the book is probably 100 pages too long. Some examples: "Such things naturally left on the surface, for the time, a chill that we vociferously denied we felt; and we had all three, with repetition, got into such splendid training that we went, each time, to mark the close of the incident, almost automatically through the very same movements." "But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connexion with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to do with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several times rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and prospect; to watch from my open window the faint summer dawn, to look at such stretches of the rest of the house that I could catch, and to listen, while in the fading dusk the first birds began to twitter, for the possible recourse of a sound or two, less natural and not without but within, that I had fancied I heard." These were sentences randomly pulled from the book and are a fair representation of the writing style of Henry James. The main part of the story is supposed to be written by the governess so one might try to argue that James is trying to capture something of the governess in this style but the introduction is virtually identical and is not written by the governess. Even the end of the story lacks completion as it leaves the entire tale unresolved. There is nothing to recommend this story for personal reading (other than being able to say you read it) and if it is required reading, at least getting through promises a grade at the end. As far as this edition of the book, it is fairly well done with a glossary in the back to explain some difficult words and phrases and a points for discussion section at the front. But with such a difficult book, I think most students would appreciate more discussion of the book in a general way and perhaps even a brief description of the action of each chapter. The book itself I would rate rather poor and this edition I would rate as fair. Overall, three stars is a generous review.