The Turn of the Screw

“Yet—the book’s greatest feat, its keenest paradox—the ultimate effect is precisely the opposite of openness. The Turn of the Screw may be the most claustrophobic book I’ve ever read. Yes, you’re free to shift constantly from one interpretation to the next, and yet, as you progress deeper into the story, each interpretation begins to seem more horrible than the other. As the gruesomeness gathers, the beautiful country house effectively falls away, like flesh receding from the skull of a cadaver, and we’re deposited in a hellish, plantless, low landscape of bone and stone: plenty of places to run, but nowhere to hide.” - Brad Leithauser, The New Yorker