The Turn of the Screw (1898)

I think there's a powerful undercurrent of the modern in this deceptive classic American horror story of and for children. I remember reading it for school at some point, I think in junior high (it couldn't have been easy!). But the more you look at the thing the more sophisticated and almost impenetrable it becomes. Perhaps the most modern part of it is the way it is actually the story, not of two children, or a possibly mad governess, or a haunted house and ghosts, but of a manuscript. The manuscript is in the possession of one "Douglas," who reads it for the entertainment of a gathering on a country outing, though none of them are ever heard from again once the governess' story, told in her manuscript, begins. At that level, of course, one soon loses all bearings, occupying the fevered brain of a frightened and/or hysterical young woman in her first real job, which she has taken (or claims to have taken) under unsettling circumstances and conditions. She sees ghosts. No one else does. She thinks the children do too. But that's not entirely clear. On the other hand, when the governess confides in the housekeeper about her experiences and describes the ghosts, strangers to her, the housekeeper recognizes them as people who have previously been involved with the children but are now dead. All this is gleaned from typical enough late James dense passages, a blizzard of intricate cross-hatching language with long tangled sentences in fat paragraphs that sprawl across most of a page, constantly qualifying anything that resembles a direct assertion. It is a kind of narrative optical illusion which looks like many things depending on how you look at it, but each with some flaw that throws the whole thing into ambiguity: A ghost story, except only one person seems to see the ghost. A woman coming undone but she's not the only one. At the end, she might even offer a flavor of the Jim Thompson psychopath, casually killing, but talking about it so elliptically you almost miss the horror show. And it's even possible here to see the children themselves as rageful aggressors, manifesting symptoms of sexual abuse. It's practically anything you want it to be and it's just a real corker.

"interlocutor" count = 3/97 pages

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)