Recommendations
Books Like The Turn of the Screw
Best books to read after The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Henry James's The Turn of the Screw is an ambiguous ghost story about a governess, two children, and a haunted house — or, in the alternative reading, about an unreliable narrator projecting her anxieties onto innocent children. These recommendations extend the experience through other Gothic fiction and through novels with radically unreliable narrators.
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Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
Du Maurier's Gothic masterpiece — a nameless narrator who moves into her husband's estate and is haunted by his first wife's presence. The most directly Gothic heir to The Turn of the Screw's formal inheritance: the isolated house, the threatening female predecessor, the uncertain supernatural.
- 2Buy
The Haunting of Hill House
by Shirley Jackson
Jackson's 1959 horror novel about four people who spend a summer in a haunted house — the twentieth-century American Gothic novel that most directly engages with James's formal achievement: the ambiguity between supernatural threat and psychological disturbance.
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Washington Square
by Henry James
The most accessible of James's novels — spare, psychologically acute, and less formally demanding than the late James. A natural next step after The Turn of the Screw for readers new to James.
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
James's masterpiece — Isabel Archer's journey through Europe and a disastrous marriage, told in James's most sustained and fully developed style. The big James after The Turn of the Screw.
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The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins
Collins's 1859 sensation novel about a woman in white, a sinister plot, and an identity theft — one of the founding texts of psychological thriller fiction that shares The Turn of the Screw's interest in paranoia and the question of what is real.
- 6Buy
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
by Shirley Jackson
Jackson's 1962 novel about two sisters living in a decaying mansion, narrated by the younger — Merricat, one of fiction's most unsettling unreliable narrators. The most Jackson-concentrated way into the same formal territory as The Turn of the Screw.
- 7Buy
The Innocents
by Jack Clayton
The 1961 film adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, directed by Jack Clayton and starring Deborah Kerr as the governess, is widely considered one of the greatest horror films ever made and the best James adaptation. If you haven't seen it, read and watch.
- 8Buy
The Other
by Thomas Tryon
Tryon's 1971 horror novel about twin boys and the death that surrounds one of them — shares The Turn of the Screw's child-centered horror and its formal ambiguity about whether the supernatural is real or whether the narrator is projecting.
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