Brandi Shuler
Welcome, classic goths and horror lovers alike, to Halloween season, and in traditional style, we must review a thriller of a piece. The Turn of the Screw was written in 1898 and has continued to surprise readers to this day. It is a story about a young woman who comes to an estate as a governess to two children who continuously become more distant as they interact with their haunted estate.
This novel does have a higher reading level than most due to its author’s writing style and it being an older, classic genre, but it makes up for it in its short format. The audiobook length averaged at about four hours. The novel was originally written in short pieces at a time and published in a weekly format in Collier’s Weekly paper. This format allowed the author to write every individual chapter with a cliff hanger that would last for days, creating boiling anticipation and letting his audience truly think about and discuss what would happen next.
It has also inspired several modern horror stories and movies like The Shining and The Boy, with its creepy mansion-like setting and themes of creepy children.
One of the main themes seen throughout the novel- one of the reasons why it’s so scary- is that nothing is ever fully explained. Formalities are used in this sense for modesty (because of the time and place it’s set in), which further builds tension in the narrator.
A key component of horror writing is showing without telling. If you’re writing about the unknown, then the last thing you want is to make that unknown known to your audience. Because of this, many theories have come out to explain everything that happens, ideas ranging from blaming the children for everything or blaming the narrator’s psyche for everything she sees.
I would give this novel a 3.5/5-star review because it wasn’t the best story I’ve read, but it was an amazing gothic story to read over a cool fall weekend. I also didn’t favor the writing style because, to be honest, it was boring at times, and because of some long sentences and words I had to look up. Other than that, The Turn of the Screw is a good story that has inspired many pieces of horror media, making it a piece of genre history.
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