Monday, July 29, 2019
The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories by Henry James (Book Review)
The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories
By Henry James
Published by Penguin Classics, 2017
Print Price: $10
I've never been the biggest Henry James fan. He writes beautifully and has a masterful control of English. In some ways he reminds me more of an impressionist poet instead of a prose novelist. Much like a poet he is very often not clear on what he is saying and it's up to the reader to connect the dots. I think the only other work I had read before this book was his novel The Ambassadors.
These are "ghost stories" I suppose. There's no gore here or people getting their heads chopped off or clawed hands reaching for frightened women or white sheeted phantoms rattling chains. No, James is way more subtle than that.
His main schtick is just for ghosts to appear....and they just stand there....and just stare at people.....
And they're not scary looking per se....they might be a bit paler than normal, and for some reason the characters get scared of them, but its not like tentacles are coming out of their head or they have fangs or anything. I can't really remember them even threatening any of the flesh and blood people in the stories. James thinks their PRESENCE is enough. More along the lines of Asian horror with its eerie sounds and atmosphere.
To me, the stories in this collection, for the most part, just didn't work. James expends a lot of prose capital hyping the ghosts and building the characterization and very rarely is the payoff at the end worth the 30 pages that have come before....After reading over a 100 pages of the longest story, The Turn of the Screw, I was left thinking ok, I THINK I understand the ending, but not really. I KINDA understand the characters but not very clearly. To me, that's the problem with James. Yes, he's a great stylist and his sentences shine with a crystalline beauty, but underneath I think he doesn't really know what he's doing.
There are some good stories here. My faves were "Sir Edmund Orme" and "The Friends of the Friends". "Orme" was about a young man who wishes to marry a girl but there is a phantom figure that is constantly her companion who can only be seen by the man and the girl's mother. "Friends" is a mysterious tale of two people that have seen ghosts but yet cannot seem to be in the same place at the same time to meet each other and talk about their common experiences.
Are these stories worth reading? A few of them. But "Turn of the Screw" which is probably his most famous story was a lot of meh to me. Most of the tales could have been written in half the pagecount and been more effective.
My Grade: B-
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Book Review
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