Book Review: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

The writing was almost impossible to decipher. At the time I read this, it was closest I have ever come to willingly putting down a novel I am reading (thanks to V.E. Schwab for making me have to edit this).

Steadying myself with it there as I had repeatedly done at those moments of torment that I have described as the moments of my knowing the children to be given to something from which I was barred, I sufficiently obeyed my habit of being prepared for the worst.

Mr. James clearly had a crippling fear of periods. I don’t know when the “don’t write like you talk” saying started becoming popular, but it clearly wasn’t during the Victorian era. This novella reads like it was written by a high-student trying to flex to a room full of University English Professors.

It was a pity that I should have to quaver out again the reasons for my not having, in my delusion, so much as questioned that the little girl saw our vistant even as I actually saw Mrs Grose herself, and that she wanted, by just so much as she did thus see, to make me suppose she didn’t, and at the same time, without showing anything, arrive at a guess as to whether I myself did!

Nothing was even scary in this book because the narrarator would always say something akin to “and then, the most terrifying thing of all happened!”. Imagine if someone tried to tell you this story around a fire (in fact, I recall that this is how the narrative is set up in the book), but every time they were getting to a scary part they said “but wait, here comes the scary part”. Somewhere between the 8th time this happened, and the 3rd time the author spent 10 minutes describing the same two children, you would decide that not even s’mores are worth this pain, and probably cram your sticky fingers into your ears.

The only saving grace of this book was that it was so short that it made counting the pages until the end easy.