The Turn of the Screw

At the top of a tower at Bly, in the copper light of an October evening, a man stands looking down at the new governess, and she has never laid eyes on him before. She will see him again, and a woman too, both dressed wrong for the season, both dead. Henry James never once says whether they are real. That refusal is the entire terrible engine of the book: either two watchful ghosts have come back for the two children in her care, or a watchful young woman, alone in a very quiet house with no one to answer to, is inventing them out of her own fear. Both readings hold, clause by clause, to the last page. Miles and Flora are almost too good, too knowing, and her love for them curdles by degrees into something that looks like possession, hers or someone else's, until the story closes its hand around the boy she is trying hardest to save. You will finish it still arguing with yourself about what you just read.