The Turn of the Screw (Thornes Classic Novels)

Paperback, 175 pages

English language

Published Oct. 8, 1996 by Trans-Atlantic Publications.

ISBN:
978-0-7487-2424-6
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(1 review)

The Turn of the Screw tells of a young governess sent to a country house to take charge of two orphans, Miles and Flora. Unsettled by a sense of intense evil within the house, she soon becomes obsessed with the belief that malevolent forces are stalking the children in her care.

37 editions

The prose is scary

This is a ghost story written in 1898. The scariest thing about it is the prose. It's terrifying! Seriously. Stay away!

The thing is hard to untangle. It's written in an archaic writing style, with an excessively wordy backward sentence structure. If I hadn't been working so hard to understand the sentences, I probably would have been able to pay attention to the story.

It's about a governess who is hired by an absentee uncle to watch over his niece and nephew in a gothic house. No gothic house is complete without a ghost. This guy got a bargain when he bought this place. It has two ghosts!

This story commits one of the major sins that I occasionally see in books and (especially) movies. The governess can see the ghosts. The two kids can see the ghosts. They refuse to speak about it! They spend the whole book dancing …

Subjects

  • Classic fiction
  • English literature: fiction texts
  • English literature: literary criticism
  • Horror & ghost stories, chillers
  • Fiction - General
  • English
  • Literary Criticism
  • Literary
  • For National Curriculum Key Stage 4 & GCSE