If you are a fan of the suspense, the mysterious and the gothic, if you watch horror movies for the psychological thrill more than for the gruesome details and chill or if you simply love Henry James and a good read, our pick of today is The Turn of the Screw, a novella that is considered to be a masterpiece of the genre.
In any dictionary of the English language, “a turn of the screw” is defined as “an action that makes a bad situation worse” and that is precisel how things evolve in this outstanding piece of writing in which tension is built up to such heights as to confuse the reader into not trusting anymore her own reasoning or understanding. Something in this story is always evading you, pushing you into unknown corners or tricking you into thinking that a new development of the events can finally shed light on the disturbing mystery of what’s going on. What’s going on? Have we made you curious yet?
Then this could be the time to plunge into this book (for a stronger effect, read it at night, under a lamppost in an empty park, when the wind blows eerily over your head or in the deadliest of silences while home alone) and cross the thin red line between what is real and what is delusional in the narrative of the governess, one of the best written unreliable narrators in the English fiction. What else needs to be said? Only that there are children, vivid imaginations and wicked thoughts involved and that you will find in there, as in any respectable ambiguous story…ghosts. Many of them. Be warned.
