The Turn of the Screw Horror Book Review

This Coffeetown Press edition of Henry James’s most famous, most widely read, and most frequently taught story presents the text as it appeared in 1908, with the author’s final revisions. The Turn of the Screw, first published in serial format in 1898, is the chilling tale of a young woman who accepts a job as governess—that is, as teacher—of two lovely young children who seem to be haunted by the spirits of a former governess and her lover, both now dead. David Gorman’s introduction is designed to help first-time readers of the tale by providing a brief historical backdrop to this tale of a haunted house and by laying out the central critical controversy that surrounds it: whether this ghost story is not about ghosts at all, or rather a probing of the psyche of a narrator who madly imagines that two ghosts threaten her young charges.