The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. It is an over-wrought over-written travesty of a book and do not tell me it was the style at the time. I’ve read Poe. I’ve read Bierce. I’ve read Mark Twain and I’ve read Saki, O. Henry, and Bret Harte. I have loved all those authors because they actually wrote. They did not plant kudzu in their garden and capture it between pages after training and stultifying it to within an inch of its life.
Faulkner once referred to Henry James as the “nicest old lady I ever met”; I consider that a calumny against old ladies, who are, in my experience, capable of getting to a point without exhausting all the air in the average zeppelin.