Sir, - I am glad to see the return of the Screw to its rightful author (L. G. Smith, letters, September 9th). Who agrees with me that this is the most wonderful horror story ever written, brilliantly suspended between the supernatural and the natural, fully delivering its brazen promise of sheer awfulness?
Henry James does an incredible balancing act: his premiss is purely psychological, though we only discover so by degrees, the delusion sufferer being the entirely reasonable narrator. The logical outcome is barely, yet truly, imaginable and believable - a case of literally scaring a child to death, as ghoulish as voodoo, within the impervious confines of calm Victorian wealth.
And who also agrees with me that Benjamin Britten and his collaborators so mangled, misconstrued and misappropriated the story, making the ghost appear to those who must have no inkling of him, mishmashing his unspeakable threat and generally making a pig's mickey of the whole thing, that the heirs and assigns of Henry James are entitled to an injunction forbidding the publishers and producers of the crass opera to use anything distantly resembling the name The Turn of the Screw? - Yours, etc.,
Danganbrack,
Quin,
Co Clare.