About the book

About Complete Edition The Turn of the Screw: With Original Illustrations

The book amply fulfills its pledge, laid down in the first few pages, that nothing can touch it in terms of sheer “dreadful—dreadfulness.” It’s the darkest, richest ghost story you’ve ever read. James' story grows ever grimmer, ever scarier. Even so, for all its ingenuities of plot, the story’s central issue, or question, can be baldly expressed: Is the governess mad? If the ghosts are real, then she is sane, and her desperate efforts to protect her dear charges, though doomed in the end, are noble and self-sacrificing. If the ghosts are mere illusions, then she is suffering a bout of insanity, in which her “revelations” about the children’s unearthly communications, and her perception of them as allied to unspeakable evil, must reflect her deeply suppressed aggression and hostility. This edition is unique through the Anatoly Toss computer-made illustrations, which were not in the original edition.

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