The Turn of the Screw is ridiculous. It is generally considered a horror novel, and a classic, by English writer Henry James. I can confirm that he must have been terrified while writing it, because his quivering fingers struck the comma key at least 11 times per sentence. The writing is so muddled that the nervous reader will soon become the confused reader, dooming the efforts of Henry James to produce real horror. Nothing is less suspenseful than rereading a sentence over and over again, just as there is nothing suspenseful about rewinding a horror movie constantly during all the scary bits to squint at the screen and confirm that there was a trace of blood on the doorknob.

”Then, before shutting her out to go, by another passage, to her own place, ‘I must just wait,’ I wound up.”

This reads like the victory speech of a triathalete. And I still don’t know what it means. Here are two more crazy sentences from a single page:

“That she now saw- as she had not, I had satisfied myself, the previous time – was proved to me by the fact that she was disturbed neither by my re-illumination nor by the haste I made to get into slippers and into a wrap.”

“What I, on my side, had to care for was, without disturbing her, to reach, from the corridor, some other window in the same quarter.”

James has a habit of interrupting the flow of the sentence. I get it. Maybe he was getting paid per word. This was the style back then. If your father bets the farm by sending you to grammar school, you show the world everything that you learned, by God! But by God if the words in some of his sentences aren’t clumsily crammed together into one awkward elevator ride. Sometimes it’s a light offense; he’ll tack a colon or semicolon onto the end of a perfectly good sentence in order to dish out second helpings of ambiguity. But all these little extras feel like the useless items you grab from the Dollar Spot at Target― the candy, miniature office supplies, and future gag gifts― that rattle around in your shopping basket, the reason that you came to the store in the first place long-forgotten.

Other than that nitpicking, the characters are static, the story is rendered basically monochromatic by its lack of description or color or vitality, and the dialogue is at times just as gloomy and vague as the prose. While I was reading this book, I felt like I was inhabiting a commercial for depression medication where everything is groggy, soulless and bland.

The Turn of the Screw is not for everyone.
Talk to your doctor if reading it makes you want to die.