The Turn of the Screw
Henry James1898
The most famous ambiguous ghost story in English.
novellaEnglishmoderateshort · ~3.5h
Influence
8.0/10
Popularity
7.5/10
“Peter Quint — you devil!”
Why It Matters
The most famous ambiguous ghost story in English. Either a tale of the supernatural or a study of a deluded young woman's destruction of two children — and James constructed the text so that no honest reading can settle the question. The novella is the foundational work of unreliable-narrator psychological horror.
The 
Take
Personal reviewToo ambiguous, I get the “is it real or in her head” concept, but just too little to go on the whole book. Nothing was that satisfying and I don’t find myself overly interested in what happened because it was too loose
Notable Quotes
“I had an absolute certainty that I should see again what I had already seen.”
“His little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.”