The Turn of the Screw

I don't even know where to start with this one, and in part that's because I've said everything I need to say about this book before about some other book or two I've recently reviewed. The Turn of the Screw is a novella written in 1898 that I bought for $2 while bored in a bookstore one day with time to kill. Sound familiar? So will this: Blech! For such a short book, there was so much about this ghost story that I didn't like at all. Things started off alright as the first six pages introduced me to an unnamed narrator and a group of people sharing ghost stories around a fire on Christmas Eve. Spooky enough, no? It felt a lot like the beginning of some contemporary Christmastime horror movie and I was, at the very least, intrigued. But suddenly on page seven one of the characters went and got a manuscript of the most disturbing ghost story he'd heard. And just like that, the group of people I had come to appreciate had vanished away as nothing more than some kind of meaningless prologue. I've already said that I've already said this, and in fact I said it rather recently when reviewing another turn-of-the-century novella (Heart of Darkness), but what the fuck is up with this story-within-a-story bullshit? There are many instances in literature and storytelling where the double-layered story works well as a plot device, but you can't just bookend a story irrelevantly with a second narrator who tells the tale. That's just bad writing! Do you remember the Nickelodeon series Are You Afraid of the Dark? In that show, a bunch of kids gathered around a campfire regularly and told spooky stories. The one-minute prologues and epilogues worked within the context of that show because it helped remind kids that these spooky stories were in fact just spooky stories. It took potentially frightened kids away from the stories themselves by showing a bunch of other kids before and after each story talking about how these were, in fact, just stories! Fine. But if you're a respected author in 1898, why are you trying to remove readers from your ghost story instead of immersing them within it? And speaking of spooky shit for kids in the '80s and '90s, do you remember the far more vague Scary Stories books? They were anthologies of urban legends and other frightening tales that often dealt with paranoia and psychological distress. And the reason I bring them up is because this eighty-page schlepfest was no more frightening and no less predictable than  any of these Scary Stories. Look, I wasn't alive back in 1898, but based on some of the stuff I've been reading lately, those were some really shitty times for people seeking a good read. Heart of Darkness? Shit. The Call of the Wild? Shit. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Total shit. Carmilla? Shit, shit, shit. It baffles me that these are the stories that have survived for more than a century and become known as classics. So superfluous and wordy while saying so little. So pretentiously verbose. I never do this, but just so you can actually see what it was like to read The Turn of the Screw, here's an excerpt for you:

"Ah, with such awful eyes!"
She stared at mine as if they might really have resembled them. "Do you mean of dislike?"
"God help us, no. Of something much worse."
"Worse than dislike?"—this left her indeed at a loss.
"With a determination—indescribable. With a kind of fury of intention."
I made her turn pale. "Intention?"

Eighty pages of that. Jesus Christ.