I was in the mood for some creepy gothic horror and The Turn of the Screw fit my needs perfectly. I love the writing and story. Really happy I finally got around to reading this novella. ( )

6/10
I have very conflicted feelings about the book and did not overly like it, but it was certainly well done. Part of these problems stem from the first gothic scene. I must have misread the setting and could not understand why the main character was so scared. After that, I could not really believe her tale and thought she was prone to overreacting. Later, the setting is further explored and I finally realised how horrible that experience would have been.
Despite this oversight, the ending is weak. Still, the prose is reasonable and storytelling strong. Will revisit James again, but not rushing off to read to him again. ( )

This is what happens when a realist tries to be a romantic. Ghost stories are irrational and melodramatic by nature, they need to be presented using theatrical tools that Henry James would have found beneath him. Instead we get what could be a gripping story buried under some grueling prose. It's exhausting.

Edit: Virginia Woolf wrote about Henry James' ghost stories positively, and it's good to see what a contemporary (a genius contemporary at that) thought of it. She confirmed what I suspected, that by their time creepy castles and rainstorms had become cheesy and psychological terror was a novelty. But she also states that he put his ghosts in a scenario of the utmost realism, vividly described, so that it created a jarring effect on the reader. It's like if we suddenly saw HD footage of aliens, something impossible depicted utterly sincerely. The effect didn't work for me but it's good to understand another perspective. ( )

Eh, I could take this or leave it. The wording on most of the sentences seemed intentionally convoluted to me. I hope all of Henry James isn't written like this. (This is my first Henry James.) I love a good Gothic story, but this is not the one for me.
*Book #135 I have read of the '1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die' ( )

When our daughter was a toddler, one of the other toddlers she regularly exchanged germs with at toddler social events was a boy named James, and James' dad's name was Henry. We would often run into the two of them, little snotnosed James sitting upon Henry's shoudlers, and I got into the habit of referring to them as a single entity, "Henry James". Look, I'd say to my daughter — there goes Henry James! Or, you'll never guess who we saw at the playground today, I'd say to my wife — our friend Henry James!

Of course, the real Henry James is no laughing matter. Reading him is like floundering in a slow-motion Sargasso Sea of language, the main clause an elusive seahorse, forever just out of reach. It's a maddening, but strangely addictive experience, playing Henry James bingo with his wild verbs of saying — adjure, pursue, asseverate — his junctures and obtrusions, his obsessive use of the feminine suffix — conductress, protectress, instructress, interlocutress. Even his shorter sentences can be maximally disorienting:

I had left her meanwhile in little doubt of my small hope of representing with success even to her actual sympathy my sense of the real splendor of the little inspiration with which, after I had got him into the house, the boy met my final articulate challenge.

It doesn't always work for me. I read The Wings of the Dove mostly while using the treadmill in a hotel in Bogotá, and the mental torture of that almost eclipsed the pain in my lungs and legs. But here, and in my favourite James, the spooky short The Jolly Corner, the murky sea of the prose replicates the psychological ambiguities of the story, and sometimes you just have to laugh out loud, as when he describes the expression on someone's face by telling us that "she had helplessly gloomed at the upper regions".

For further Jamesian comedy I refer you to Edith Wharton's experience of wayfinding with him. ( )