The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories

by Henry James, Tim Lustig (Editor)

Whether viewed as a subtle, self-conscious exploration of the haunted house of Victorian culture, filled with echoes of sexual and social unease, or simply as "the most hopelessly evil story we have ever read," The Turn of the Screw is probably the most famous of ghostly tales and certainly the most eerily equivocal. This new edition includes three rarely reprinted ghost stories from the 1890s, "Sir Edmund Orme," "Owen Wingrave," and "The Friends of the Friends," as well as relevant extracts from James's notebooks and journals.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Short Stories, Horror, Gothic, 19th Century, Literature

266 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1937

About the author

Henry James was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady. His later works, such as The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to Impressionist painting.
His novella The Turn of the Screw has garnered a reputation as the most analysed and ambiguous ghost story in the English language and remains his most widely adapted work in other media. He wrote other highly regarded ghost stories, such as "The Jolly Corner".
James published articles and books of criticism, travel, biography, autobiography, and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as a young man, and eventually settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1915, a year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916. Jorge Luis Borges said "I have visited some literatures of East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic compendium of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James."

Reviews

[Rosie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would not, having perused this book at leisure, for an indeterminate period of time, after it was recommended, indeed, after I was encouraged to make it my mission to enjoy it, and found it wanting, read this book again.

If you enjoyed reading that sentence then you will enjoy this book. If not, then don't even bother.

I am not faint-hearted when it comes to reading different types of writing, but seriously, 'The Turn of the Screw' was horrendously hard to follow, with hugely long sentences and constant exclamations like 'I speak of him of course', which leave the reader with NO idea of whom the characters are speaking.

I came to this novel expecting a ghost story and left it with just a feeling of confusion. In all honesty, I would never have picked up on the fact that the governess is possibly going mad had I not already been aware of that element before I started, since the whole thing was so difficult to follow.

I think this is more worth reading as a study in language and writing than as an a story.

[Rochelle ✿ · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would rate The Real Thing ☆☆☆ (interesting exploration of art, class and identity), but The Figure in the Carpet and the other short stories were not worth my time. I skimmed through them out of boredom. They were not engaging enough to keep my attention.

The Turn of the Screw is another ☆☆☆ story for me. I found the narrative tense and the setting haunting. If it was meant to be an exploration of female hysteria, it was well done; if its main theme was lack of direct communication and how that leads to the reinforcement of taboo subjects, James got that point across. It is still unclear to me where the protagonist's drive came from, and why she did not flee, and I found most of the dialogue extremely frustrating because of how confusing it was, but it was overall well worth the read.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll be honest - I found this a really hard, slow slog to read. James's prose is very convoluted by modern standards, with long compound sentences and archaic usage (the book was first published in 1898). I'm giving it three stars, rather than two, because of the significant influence it has been on subsequent "ghost story" literature, including favourites of mine such as The Woman in Black by Susan Hill and more recently The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware. James does maintain a palpable tension throughout, together with an uncertainty in the reader as to whether the apparitions are real or simply some sort of protracted hysterical hallucination on the part of the governess.

[John Guild · Rating 5 out of 5]

Henry James is an undeniable pain-in-the-ass to read. The sentences just meander along, picking up extra clauses like lint and dander, until they become so fluffy you can barely identify their original shape. Syntactically speaking, he is hard work, harder than Conrad, and about as hard as Proust.
But he is great. This is an unbelievable work of fiction--one of the best horror stories in the English language. It is loaded with meaning, yet it is deliciously ambiguous. You could spend months arguing over what actually happens. Bottom line: a lot of work, but totally worth the effort.

[Momčilo Žunić]

Možda pripovedni resto ovog izdanja ne voza onako kako sam mu se nadao - premda Džejms i tu pruža poslovični dodatni zavrtanj - ali je zato završni "Okretaj zavrtnja" uvek frustrirajuća [i seksualno, naravski!], slasna interpretativna pošast.

[Rowland Pasaribu · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Turn of the Screw was originally published as a serialized novel in Collier's Weekly. Robert J. Collier, whose father had founded the magazine, had just become editor. At the time, James was already a well-known author, having already published The Europeans, Daisy Miller, Washington Square, and The Bostonians. Collier was hoping to increase his magazine's circulation and revenue and to improve its reputation by publishing the works of a serious, well-known author like James. James himself had just signed a long-term lease on a house in Sussex and needed the extra income to facilitate moving from his residence in London. Thus, James agreed to Collier's proposal that he write a twelve-part ghost story in 1897.

James finished The Turn of the Screw in November 1897, and the story was published in Collier's between January and April of 1898. The text of the story consisted of a prologue and twelve chapters in both the serialized publication and later book versions. In Collier's, the story was further divided into five "parts" and published in twelve installments.

James's agreement to publish his story in Collier's was done with the understanding that he would publish a book version as well. Heinemann in England and Macmillan in New York both published book versions of The Turn of the Screw, the text identical except that they lacked the five "parts" markings, in the fall of 1898. In 1908, James published his complete works in what is now known as "The New York Edition." The Turn of the Screw appeared in Volume 16, along with another novella, The Aspern Papers, and two short stories, "The Liar" and "The Two Faces."
The Turn of the Screw is a novella, which means that it is long story, shorter than a traditional novel but focusing on actions of greater scope than the short story. In James's 1908 publication of The Turn of the Screw, he made a very few emendations to his text - most of which are minor semantic and punctuation changes. One noteworthy thing that James changed in this edition is Flora's age. In the 1898 publication, Flora is six-years-old; in 1908, she becomes eight. This may simply have resulted from James's realization, after the first publication, that Flora speaks and acts as if she is older than six.

James wrote The Turn of the Screw at a time during which belief in ghosts and spirituality was very prevalent in England and America. The spirituality craze had begun in 1848 when the two young Fox sisters in New York heard unexplained rappings in their bedroom. They were able to ask questions and receive answers in raps from what they - and the many people who became aware of their case - believed was a dead person. That same year, a book about the "science" of ghosts, The Night Side of Nature; or, Ghosts and Ghost Seers, by Catherine Crowe was published and became very popular.

The Society for Psychical Research, of which James's brother and father were members, was founded in 1882. It was an offshoot of the Cambridge Ghost Club, founded in 1851 at Trinity College at Cambridge University - where the prologue's Douglas was a student. Reading The Turn of the Screw, it is important to remember that despite twentieth-century skepticism towards ghosts and the paranormal, many educated nineteenth-century readers did believe in ghosts and spirituality.

On significant reason for the rise in spirituality's popularity in nineteenth-century is widespread disillusionment with traditional religion. Unable to believe in the all-powerful and benevolent Deity preached by the Christian church, many intellectuals of the day turned away from Christianity. James himself was acquainted with the Concord school of transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. Because of the loss of Christian faith, traditionally a comfort to those who had lost loved ones or who faced death themselves, many people searched for a new way of understanding and accepting death. Spirituality was not limited to the scholarly studies of William James; many of its adherents sought solace in the possibility of communicating with dead family members and loved ones at seances - in reassuring themselves that there was an Other Side.

James, however, emphasizes in the Preface to his 1908 edition that Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are not ghosts as that term had come to be understood by the turn of the century. These ghosts, he says, now the subjects of laboratory study, cannot stir "the dear old sacred terror" as old-time ghost stories could. Modern ghosts make "poor subjects," and his ghosts, therefore, would be agents of evil - "goblins, elves, imps, demons as loosely constructed as those of the old trials for witchcraft."

The content of James book comes from "real-life" ghostly encounters about which he had heard. In the preface, James speaks of being one of a group on a winter afternoon in an old country house - very much like the narrator of his prologue - when his host recalled the fragment of a tale told to him as a young man by a lady. She did not have the whole story but could only tell him that it dealt with "a couple of small children in an out-of-the-way place, to whom the spirits of certain Œbad' servants, dead in the employ of the house, were believed to have appeared with the design of Œgetting hold' of them." James said he remembered the story as a worthwhile subject to be built upon when the proposal from Collier's came.

In addition to the ghost stories of which James himself wrote and spoke of being aware, a number of critics have proposed additional literary and real-life influences on the subject matter in The Turn of the Screw. These include works of nineteenth-century English fiction, including Dickens's Oliver Twist, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and Mrs. Gaskell's "The Old Nurse's Story," as well as other literature, including Henry Fielding's Amelia and Goethe's "Erlkönig." Other influences include a nineteenth-century medical text which discusses governesses, suggested by critic William J. Scheick, Freud's patient "Miss Lucy R.," suggested by Oscar Cargill, and a medical book about temporal lobe epilepsy, suggested by J. Purdon Martin.

In his 1908 preface, James also speaks of complaints that his governess is not "sufficiently Œcharacterised.'" He argues that no good writing comes of tackling all difficulties but that good writing instead results from focusing on a limited number of elements - in his case, the ghosts and the implication of evil. It seems surprising, then, that so much of the criticism and discussion surrounding the book since its publication centered around the governess and her consciousness.

Before James's time, most fiction was written from the author's point-of-view. S/he described the characters' actions and told the reader their significance and meaning. The fiction of Dickens and of the Brontës, for example, follows this model. James's contribution to fiction included his work on point-of-view. Many of James's works are characterized by a central intelligence - that is, a character through whose eyes the reader sees the story. The reader, therefore, responds not as an objective viewer but as a participant in the story. Reading The Turn of the Screw from the point-of-view of the governess, the reader has a limited knowledge and perception of the events occurring at Bly and must trust - perhaps to his or her peril - the judgment of the governess.

Another significant aspect of James's novel is his use of the confidant character. The use of the confidant precedes far back into literature. In a novel in which we have limited access to the main character's mind - as we will until the establishment of stream-of-consciousness technique in the twentieth-century - the confidant character gives us an extra chance to see what the main character is thinking. Thus, we learn about the governess's thoughts and assumptions through her conversations with her confidant, Mrs. Grose. Here, as with point-of-view, James challenges the reader. We cannot be certain that the governess tells the truth to her confidant, nor can we be sure that Mrs. Grose does not have her own agenda in listening to the governess's thoughts.

In the decades following the publication of The Turn of the Screw, it was generally accepted that the governess was a benevolent character, fighting against evil ghosts to protect Flora and Miles. In 1919, Henry Beers mentioned that he had always thought the governess to be mad but little thought was given to the comment. Swarthmore English professor Harold Goddard wrote an essay arguing the same point around 1920, but it was not published until his daughter found it after his death in 1957. The true originator of the theory, therefore, is Edna Kenton, who published an essay in 1924, suggesting the story is more about the governess's troubled mind than about the ghosts and children. However, Edmund Wilson's 1934 essay "The Ambiguity of Henry James" has been the most influential of all. Drawing heavily on Freudian theory, Wilson argues that the governess's sexual repression leads her to neurotically imagine and interpret the ghosts.

In nearly all writing since Wilson's landmark essay, critics have been forced to decide whether the governess is mad or if there are ghosts. Those arguing for the ghosts emphasize that James, in his 1908 preface, called the book a "fairy-tale pure and simple" and that none of his other ghost stories are considered hallucinations. Feminist critics have recently picked up this thread, suggesting that the assumption the governess is a sexual hysteric, imagining the ghosts, would not have been made were the narrator a man. Such readings see the framing of the story by what is presumably - though not explicitly - a male narrator, and by the definitely male Douglas, who undercut the governess's authority but emphasizing his inexperience and youth as expressing distrust in the female narrator.

More recently, postmodernism has led critics toward a less combatant approach toward The Turn of the Screw. Many critics have taken to accepting the ambiguity in James's writing and acknowledging that nearly every incident can be interpreted to prove the governess is mad and to prove that there are ghosts. In making this statement, critics draw attention away from this irresolvable controversy and towards the language James uses to create this much-read and much-interpreted text.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Also includes "Washington Square," "Daisy Miller," "The Beast in the Jungle," and "The Jolly Corner" -- all 5 star stories.

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this collection of four stories by Henry James! I plan to re-read "The Turn of the Screw" during October, Halloween season in the US. They are ghostly stories, grim and suggestively evil, as real ghosts must be, and they are deeply satisfying examples of the gothic horror genre. This Oxford edition of The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories includes: "Sir Edmund Orme"; "Owen Wingrave"; "The Friends of the Friends"; and finally "The Turn of the Screw". It contains an informative "Introduction " and notes by T. J. Lustig, James scholar and author, four pages of suggested "Further Readings" and a scholarly Appendix taken from the notebooks of author Henry James.

Some readers complain that Henry James is too difficult to read, but I disagree. Granted that his sentences can be grammatically complex and even convoluted, every word is critical to his meaning. Each story is a compact session with gothic horror and the endings are startling and assume the reader's suspension of disbelief. Since James' style is literary realism, the reader is carried through the narratives with a sense of trust in the narrator even when the topic is unsettling. Details surrounding the carefully drawn characters and their surroundings further one's sense of "the real" even when we are immersed in the supernatural.

Authenticity can be viewed as a trademark of this author. In the book Henry James in Context by , by David McWhirter, we get this analysis. "More consistently and more explicitly than any of his contemporaries, American or European, Henry James recognized literary realism as the attempt not to reproduce the real directly, but rather to create an impression of it – to evoke for readers the ‘sense’, the ‘air’, ‘the odour’, the ‘strange, irregular rhythm’ of reality (LC-1, 52–3, 58)."

In "Owen Wingrave", we are introduced to the old house Paramore, itself a character.

"This very short second visit . . . was to constitute the strangest episode of his life. As soon as he found himself in private with his wife---they had retired to dress for dinner--they called each other's attention with effusion and almost with alarm to the sinister gloom diffused through the place. The house was admirable from its old grey front, which came forward in wings so as to form three sides of a square, but Mrs. Coyle made no scruple to declare that if she had known in advance the sort of impression she was going to receive she would never have put her foot in it. She characterized it as 'uncanny' and as looking wicked and weird . . . "

As the reader enters the house with the characters, there is a sense of giant "wings" wrapping around you, uniting you with Owen Wingrave and the terrors he must face. Realism and horror indeed!

[Cal]

I only made it half way through The Turn of the Screw before I gave up in frustration. I found myself rereading almost every sentence because the writing style is so fragmented. The story never finds a rhythm because it is constantly being interjected by awkwardly placed prose that is jammed in the middle of a sentence as if it was thought of after the sentence was started and ot was too late to go back and work it into the story.

[Onewooga · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to say, you need patience to read Henry James. The man is a master of the clause and the prepositional phrase. If you are an English teacher forced to torture your students with diagramming sentences, James is your man. That being said, the stories are really quite subtle and sneakily brilliant. I kept thinking, OK, where is this going, Henry, and then we'd get there and I'd think: WOW. My favorites in this collection do not actually include "The Turn of the Screw," which was my original reason for reading it. That story is fun, but I find "The Beast in the Jungle" and "The Jolly Corner" to be my favorites--and in some ways they complement each other, with similar themes although different outcomes--and I also liked "The Tree of Knowledge." The prose here is much different than what you get with a more modern writer, but I can't help thinking none of us is capable, any more, of writing this way.

[Blair · Rating 3 out of 5]

You better put on your workboots to read James. But is it really worth the paycheque?

[Campbell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this interminable, though I admire the skill with which he walked the tightrope of ambiguity between mental illness and supernatural manifestation.

[Taske · Rating 2 out of 5]

Listam svoje recenzije i vidim da sam ovoj zbirci dao četvorku.
Znam i zašto, pomislio sam tada da je ovo ipak klasik, pa da se ne ogrešim.
Sad se nešto razmišljam... Mnogo me pa zabole, ove priče su nešto najdosadnije
što sam pročitao u životu. Mene ne zanima šta je pisac hteo da kaže, nego šta je kazao.
A njegov stil pisanja, je jedini "horor" ovde.

[Liquid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Henri Džejms baš nije umeo duge rečenice, što ga nije sprečilo da ih upotrebljava ~~veoma često. Prve tri priče su mi se dopale, Okretaj zavrtnja mi nije baš najbolje legla (kao ni prvi put kad sam je čitala pre nekoliko godina).

[Sana Abdulla · Rating 2 out of 5]

Over the years I tried to read books by Henry James but had to give up, I just managed Washington Square. His books make excellent movies - my heartfelt sympathies to the scriptwriters - as his writing style is difficult and rambling and his characters never call a spade a spade. He embelishes his sentences to the point of making the reader either read over and over, or lose track of the storyline.
This book left me wondering if he was a bad writer or he deliberately wants the reader to guess his intentions.
The book contained 4 short stories, the second being the most straight forward. When it comes to Henry James I will stick to films.
I strongly recommend watching Washington Square and the Wings of the dove. Leave his books at the bookshop to be picked up by innocent victims.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Malevolence or hysteria?

This short story bears multiple readings: it has terrified me in the past, but can also be seen as a narrative of female hysteria and twisted delusion. James takes the traditional English ghost story and modernises it so that the slippages in the governess's tale *are* the story.

This is ambiguous, malevolent and a masterclass in tension and the macabre - wherever we locate the latter. This probably isn't for readers who want linear and straightforward story-telling but this remains one of the most accessible introductions to James' notoriously difficult prose style.

[Jessica · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was awful. Not scary, not exciting, barely readable, it's not often I tear into a book like this and I'm really not enjoying it, but this book is so dated and badly written that I just didn't care about the characters, the story, anything. Was she being haunted? Who on earth knows? Why did the kid just drop dead? Who on earth cares. This book was, in my opinion, pig shit. I am furious at being made to study it. I couldn't even read the three other stories in the collection.

[Fedor Marjanović · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ne mogu, ali zaista ne mogu dovoljno preporučiti Orfelinovo izdanje. Osim same novele i drugih Džejmskovih priča o duhovima, prateći tekstovi (autorov i Ognjanovićev pogovor) kao i vizuelni dodaci (ilustracije Džejmsove novele, kao i fotografije iz filma "Nedužni") upotpunjuju čitalačko iskustvo. Ako postoji knjiga na srpskom jeziku koja najbolje predstavlja Džejmsa kao horor autora to je ova.

Sam "Okretaj zavrtnja" danas može djelovati pomalo zastarjelo, jer u njemu nalazimo sve književne trikove koji su krajem devetnaestog vijeka možda bili inovativni, ali su danas korišteni mnoštvo puta. Ipak, vratiti se starom majstoru nikad nije loše, pogotovo ako je Majstor. Osim što nas uči kako se s lakoćom vodi priča i stvara tenzija (doslovno se osjeća čitalački zavrtanj kako se steže), Džejms nas uči da je strašnije od utvara nakazna stvarnost koja se iza njih prikriva. U ovom slučaju duhovi su jedan jeziv paravan iza kojeg se naslućuje seksualno zlostavljanje djece, što potvrđuje da je stvarnost daleko strašnija od fantastike. Zapravo, Nabokov i "Lolita" mnogo duguju Džejmsovom "Zavrtnju".

I ako nije bilo već jasno, kupujte Orfelinova izdanja. Ljubav kojom se posvećuju svojim izdanjima je zadivljujuća i zastrašujuća.

[Dijana · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

Moram odmah reći da je ovo ocena isključivo za “Okretaj zavrtnja” jer ovo nije edicija koju sam čitala, ali kako te edicije nema, bilo je nešto najbliže tome.

Elem, što se samog romana tiče, mogu reći da mi se više dopao od nekih sličnog žanra. U ovom romanu naš narator je devojka koja je svoju priču u pisanoj formi predala čoveku koji tu priču čita zainteresovanim slušaocima. Priča je o tome kako je ona poslata da bude guvernanta u zabačenoj engleskoj plemićkoj kući. Njeni štićenici su Flora i Majls, deca naizgled anđeoskog izgleda i naravi. Guvernanta na prvu loptu biva očarana decom, ali jako brzo uviđa da se na imanju dešavaju i druge čudne stvari. Ono što se meni jako dopalo u romanu jeste to što posle svakog događaja ili dijaloga imamo dve mogućnosti: ili je ono što je napisano istina, ili je guvernanta luda, a kako je roman napisan u prvom licu, mi zapravo sve i posmatramo kroz guvernantine oči.
Da ne dužim previše o samoj radnji jer roman i nije dugačak pa ne treba sve ni otkrivati, mogu reći i da mi je stil lako tekao (pogotovo ako se uzme u obzir to da je roman napisan 1898. godine).

Sve u svemu, preporuka za sve koji vole neki vid “klasičnog horora” ovog doba kao što je “Ukleta kuća na brdu” ili nešto slično tome.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

If for some reason you have never read Henry James before, I urge you to begin by reading his short novels and short stories, of which The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories is a worthy collection.

To those who are not familiar with his work, James seems to be a singularly bland, even bloodless character who seems incapable to any great depths. Far from it! Why I particularly like this collection is that it includes a number of stories in which the author, being cognizant of his reputation, tries to address it. In this category are "The Real Thing," "The Figure in the Carpet," "The Tree of Knowledge," "Maud-Evelyn," and most especially the great "The Beast in the Jungle."

Also included are two great ghost stories, the novelette-length "The Turn of the Screw" and the surprising "The Jolly Corner." These and all the other stories are from the early 1900s.

Usually, I like to include a quote from the author, but James does not quote well. With him, the context is everything. And how he manipulates the reader by lulling him or her into a false sense of boredom before he wrenches the carpet away and one finds one is groveling among the dust bunnies.

[Fábio de Carvalho · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really took way too much time reading this, and while it is partially because I just couldn't get into it, it viciously made it even harder for me to connect with the book.

In the end, the story I liked most was that of The Friends of the Friends, revolving around two people seemingly unable to meet for years because of various coincidences and accidents. It presented obsession, jealousy and a touch of cosmic malice that presented me with the exact eeriness I love to see in horror writing.

Obviously, I read the collection because of The Turn of the Screw, and I'm sad and, frankly, ashamed, to have to admit that I didn't understand a thing about it. Everything seemed repetitive, muddled, voluntarily opaque and I could not understand neither where Henry James was going or what he was trying to convey. I certainly did not feel any sense of dread either, reading it. I know it is regarded as a great piece of work and as a true classic, and most of the times, when I don't like a classic, it is because, while I understand why it is held in such high regards, I don't agree with the qualities people see in them, or because I see flaws too important for me. Here, it's like I can't even understand why it is so touted, and I can't help but think that it must be because I failed as a reader, somewhere, somehow, while reading the story.

[Osore Misanthrope]

Заобићи друге приче о духовима, изузетно су прозаичне и испразне.

[Pascal Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a magisterial treatise on spinster breakdown, look no further than TTotS. /

[Shriya Uday · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Turn of the Screw is really really good and it's so much more complex and interesting than its santized retelling (bly manor) could hope to be. There're some other interesting ideas in the other stories but I just cannot get through his writing, dear god.

[Ivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Turn of the screw 4 stars, other stories 2 stars. Luckly title story is the longest one and makes nearly half of this book. The rest failed to grab me. They don't build up atmosphere, they are not scary or even creepy and don't have much going for them except Henry James's writing style.

[Kathrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm kind of amazed that I read this in high school, and I'm wondering what I got out of it back then. I remember putting it on the "I like this one" list, but past that, I don't know. After a re-read, I still put it on that list, but I imagine I've put it there for very different reasons. I've struggled a long time with my relationship with Henry James; I very much appreciate him and admire him, but sometimes I do wish he'd just get to the point. He seems to do this much more gingerly in the three accompanying stories to this edition. And while they all do qualify as ghost stories, Turn of the Screw is certainly the only one I might call horrific. But the horror, to me, is absolutely internal. I don't trust our narrator for a minute, (as I fear I may have back in high school, as I hadn't been a practised enough reader to realize I don't have to trust my narrator.) I think our narrator wants a ghost story as much as we do, so she plants the images that will give her the most fright, and the true horror is that she believes her own narration.
I think that there are two ways to approach Henry James; one is to search for his "moral", find the phrases that back up your theory, and compare them to the thousands of other James' theorists in print. There is always plenty of material ripe for analysis. James is nothing if not thorough in his reasoning. The other way is to simply let the words run over you and carry you along, and, even if you feel a bit mired in his wordiness, you will come out the other end of the paragraph with something close to epiphany.

[Blair · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5 for the 'other stories', 4/5 for The Turn of the Screw itself, so more of a 3.5/5 overall. The other stories didn't leave much of an impression on me. As far as classic supernatural/ghostly tales go, I think I prefer the more explicit otherworldliness of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories. The Turn of the Screw was suitably atmospheric, although I found it hard to divorce from my previous impressions of the story, especially the souped-up version delivered by the recent BBC TV adaptation. I liked the ambiguity of the story and the way the reader is left to make up their own mind about whether the 'ghosts' are real. (Personally I'm inclined to think not, although I thought the children were ghastly anyway!) To be fair, I read this on a plane and it's the sort of book you should really curl up with somewhere quiet on a stormy winter night. I might give it another try later.

[Strasna Mera]

Pročitala sam samo naslovnu priču i moram priznati da priča "vozi", a uzbuđenje raste, tako da se knjiga jedva ispušta iz ruku. Klimaks je po meni izostao, ali možda je ne dožive i drugi tako. Jezik je starinski, meni je godio, ali evo mog sina odbija, a na njegovo insistiranje sam knjigu kupila. Ovo izdanje je odlično opremljeno, pa sam uživala čitajući i propratne tekstove koji idu uz ovu priču.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Left expecting more.

[Vojin Hubert]

Kad sam prvi put čitao Okretaj zavrtnja, očekivao sam senzacionalističku horor priču i nisam baš bio oduševljen.
Kad sam, sada, drugi put čitao Okretaj, nisam znao šta da očekujem pa nisam ni imao neka očekivanja, međutim, neka magija se desila haha tkd sam, što sam više uranjao u priču, više uživao u beskonačnoj lepezi tumačenja koju nudi gotovo svaka rečenica ove novele. Ništa nije konkretno, zlokoban osećaj je sveprisutan, ali saznanje o njegovom poreklu i pravoj prirodi ne dobijamo servirano na tacni na kraju priče, već nam ostaje da naslućujemo i sami biramo način na koji ćemo da posmatramo ovo delo, poput holograma koji nam pokazuje drugačiju sliku u zavisnosti od toga gde stojimo dok ga gledamo.