A Delicious Halloween Scare Of The Literary Sort

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 5:16 PM Eastern on 31 Oct. See below.]

There are ghost stories of the Stephen King sort (The Shining, for example) and there are ghost stories of the Poe sort (The Fall of the House of Usher, for example). And then there is The Turn of the Screw, the 1898 Henry James long short story or novella; a ghost story nonpareil and sui generis. Is the young governess narrator (she’s not identified by name) reliable and her chronicle of the demon ghosts, Quint and Miss Jessel, and their evil purpose a record of events real and true? Or is she a love-struck, sexually repressed, flaming neurotic whose narrative requires a Freudian reading in order to even begin to rightly comprehend? Or is she simply a flat-out loony; an early-stage paranoid schizophrenic complete with hallucinations and lunatic delusions whose chilling narrative is the product of a disordered mind (so perfect a portrait of the clinical type does James draw that up until the very last page of the tale I was convinced of this even though I’ve never seen a critique that so much as touches on this possibility as an explanation of the tale)? After more than 100 years, hundreds of articles and theses, and hundreds of thousands of words, the members of the jury are still out on the answers to those questions, and I along with them.

And then there’s the writing itself. James’s prose and his sentence structure are maddeningly 19th-century tortuous and ornamented, and a 21st-century reader has first to mentally prepare himself for that before even beginning to read. Or is it rather that the governess’s prose and sentence structure are such (the narrative is a recitation of her written record)? As TTotS is the only James I’ve ever read, I’m in no position to make any judgment concerning that. (Note: See Update below.)

Its prose style and sentence structure notwithstanding, the text is ordered in such a tight, organic manner that my plan to include here a coherent, stand-alone representative excerpt from that text for those of you who’ve never read this tale was defeated utterly. Taken out of context, no part of the text makes any real impact. The genuinely chilling impact of both the individual events and of the tale itself is rather a product of the cumulative effect of the text of the telling, and it’s perhaps precisely that which makes TTotS the nonpareil and sui generis thing that it is.

If you’re looking for a delicious literary scare this Halloween, put down whatever it is you might be reading, and pick up this paragon of a literary ghost story. You can’t get from the movie (The Innocents) or even from the opera (Britten’s, The Turn of the Screw) based on the tale, brilliant though the latter may be, even a modicum of the sinisterly chilling effect produced by James’s text itself.

Trust me.

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Update (5:16 PM Eastern on 31 Oct): How thoroughly stupid of me to write as I did above:

And then there’s the writing itself. James’s prose and his sentence structure are maddeningly 19th-century tortuous and ornamented, and a 21st-century reader has first to mentally prepare himself for that before even beginning to read. Or is it rather that the governess’s prose and sentence structure are such (the narrative is a recitation of her written record)? As TTotS is the only James I’ve ever read, I’m in no position to make any judgment concerning that.

The entire Prologue of TTotS is written by James in propria persona, and the style and sentence structure of that text bears little resemblance to the style and sentence structure of the text of the tale itself which, as the tale has it, was written by the young governess herself. And so the answer to this question was all the while quite literally staring me in the face.

Jeez!