Reviews

Ghost Stories by Henry James

boose's review

kıskançlığından eski nişanlısını intihara sürükleyen kraliçe favorimdi

kundor's review

2.0

I only read "The Turn of the Screw." It was strangely hard to follow - much more so than Sherlock Holmes stories, which I just read and were written at the same time. Perhaps this is because it was written in a conversational, "chatty" style, but the norms of conversation have changed enough that it's hard to reconstruct the meaning. Also, the worst "evil" that the bad guys apparently get up to is talking trash and stealing letters. Ho-hum. James says that leaving the evil up to the imagination allows it to far exceed whatever he could come up with, but I mean how bad could it have been out in the country where nobody died, left, or called the cops? Kinky sex? Doing drugs? Blaspheming? All pretty tame. James may think that any concrete details will only let down the built-up expectation of evil, but this is really just a failure of imagination on his part. Iain M. Banks is capable of writing acts so heinously evil that they induce memory repression, night terrors, clawing out your eyes, etc.