Oh Henry

This day brings you a reformed bookworm. I'm never going to say bad things about Henry James again.

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Last weekend, I read The Turn of the Screw and it was amazingly, jaw-droppingly good. It was brilliant. I'm practically on my knees in bookworm reverence at how one can read this short novel with "double vision". James wrote it so neatly that it can be read as a ghost story or a psychological novel. Very cool! I keep dipping into it again and again to examine different scenes, reading them one way and another. It's like having a new (educational) toy, or one of those optical illusion pictures in which you see the old lady one way and the young lady another way.

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Henry James' brambly sentences are what make it all work perfectly. He creates a kind of sickening (vertiginousness, claustrophobic) atmosphere that I've also experienced while reading another great horror novel, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. (I'm almost positive now that she had James in mind when writing that book.) Also, the reader is cutting through that thicket of words, trying to make sense of what's going on just as the main character is and while that's going on, James has been busy leaving little clues...oh, it's too marvelous. If you haven't read it yet, you must. Even if you're intimidated by Henry James -- like I've been all these years.

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Nothing beats that singular bookworm rush of falling in LitLove again.