Today I finished reading Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. It's one of the most famous ghost stories of all time, so I'm sure I'm going to get quite a bit of flak for this. I didn't like it.
Personally, I'm not a fan of that nineteenth-century prose. That's why, when I studied it for my Leaving Cert, I needed a junior retelling just to make head or tail of Wuthering Heights! It's really something when Shakespeare is actually easier to understand!
The maddening thing is that, with Turn of the Screw, I saw brief glimpses of how impactive this story could have been. The whole idea of the children being led astray and corrupted had a lot of potential. But, again, that old-fashioned text did not convey it effectively to me at all.
So I'm generally not scared by ghost stories anyway, and the way this one was written certainly did nothing to help.
I never thought I'd say this, but I'll probably just stick to the film adaptation, The Innocents.
My rating: 50%.
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