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The Turn of the Screw (Thornes Classic Novels) (Paperback, 1996, Trans-Atlantic Publications) 1 star

The Turn of the Screw tells of a young governess sent to a country house …

The prose is scary

1 star

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 …