Customer Reviews
Terrifying tale - By: Roman Clodia, 27 Jun 2008 
Unlike some of the other reviewers here I still think this is the creepiest book I've ever read, & all the more terrifying for the fact that James never articulates what's going on - he simply leaves your imagination to float free & conjure up all your worse nightmares. Yes, he's never an easy read (though this is far more accessible than Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl etc) but I think his very stately, mannered sentences & diction actually add to the horror of the story. Don't read this if you're expecting Stephen King or The Exorcist - James expects his readers to make the effort to read properly. Someone called this (possibly James himself?)'the most poisonous little tale I could imagine' & I think that's a perfect description - when I re-read it, it was on the tube with bright lights & lots of people around as I couldn't face reading it at home alone!
Base menials - By: Luc REYNAERT, 06 Dec 2006 
Henry James is a prime aristocrat, a not always very subtle defender of the leisure class. Two short storiesin this bundle show it profusely.
In `The Turn of the Screw', two aristocratic children are haunted by two `base menials' (`You reminded him that Quint was only a base menial?'). Henry James fears really that the higher classes will be contaminated & corrupted by the lower classes: `I should continue to defer to the old tradition of the criminality of those caretakers of the young who minister to superstition & fears.'
The evil comes out of the lower classes, `For the love of all the evil that the pair (of servants) put into them.'
At the end, one of the children succumbs to the same fate as the childin `Erlkoenig' by Goethe, Erlkoenig being the quintessence of the evil force, the killer of innocence.
In `Owen Wingrave' (masterly transformed into an opera by Benjamin Britten), the main character refuses to step into the tradition of his ancestors & to become a soldier (and die on the battlefield). On the contrary, he calls war an overwhelming stupidity, the `crash barbarism'. He doesn't understand `why nations don't tear to pieces the governments, the rulers that go for them.'
For Henry James, the ideas & the behavior of Owen Wingrave are like `fallingin love with a low girl.'
At the end, Owen is slain by the ghost of one of his ancestors, dying on his own battlefield (for his ideas). The last words of the story (`gained field') would mean that the aristocracy has adopted the `anti-war' policy.
These perfectly constructed & brilliantly written stories reveal Henry James's real obsession: preserve the `purity' of his kind.
Henry James at his best. - By: LaCatalina, 10 May 2001 This collection includes the classic Turn of the Screw. It is a story about a nannyin a large country house & its eerie occurrences. "Friends of the Friends" is a similarly creepy story about death.
