With Halloween less than a week away, today might be a good time to mention a Blog I recently came across called I've Been Reading Lately. Its author is in the publishing business and apparently when he isn’t reading, he is writing.
The blogger, Levi Stahl, has written a lot in recent posts about ghosts in general, and about Turn of the Screw and the other ghost stories of Henry James in particular. He makes several statements that I especially liked in his discussions; among them:
“There is one line that may--that, let us be clear, must--be drawn: they ask, again and again, whether the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw are real or merely a product of the governess's imagination, while we explain, again and again, that that's not the point.
I suppose I appreciate that because it validates my own opinion that the ambiguity – the never really knowing if the ghosts are internal or external – is what elevates this from a good ghost story to an extraordinary tale.
In his post Stahl also points out that great horror writers (he specifically mentions James and Stephen King) all intuitively understand that “What's scary is what's strange; what's terrifying is what's only a tiny bit stranger than what's going on around us all the time.”
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