Coming in September, 2026 - Innocent, A Sequel to The Turn of the Screw

“She shuts her eyes in the dark, but I think that’s silly. I always look in the dark.”

“Oh, look! It’s a lovely spider, and it’s eating a butterfly.”

-Flora, The Innocents (1961)

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My first exposure to The Turn of the Screw was through the TV series Dark Shadows. I started watching reruns on the Sci-Fi Channel when I was in high school, starting with Julia Hoffman’s arrival at Collinwood. By the following year, the ghosts of Quentin Collins and Beth Chavez began to materialize to the children of Collinwood. Fans on the Internet message boards referred to this as “the Turn of the Screw story line.” I had no idea what they were  talking about. I had ever heard of The Turn of the Screw, nor seen any of the many, many adaptations. (I’ve read that Turn of the Screw is the most frequently filmed ghost story, though I’m not sure if whoever compiled that trivia counted A Christmas Carol as a ghost story). Immediately, I ran to the school library to find a copy so I could better understand the story line’s inspiration and not feel left out. (Years later, I found the same book, now stamped “Withdrawn,” for sale at the public library).

Unfortunately, reading The Turn of the Screw gave me no further insights because I could make very little sense of the book. Henry James’s prose is longwinded with single sentences frequently running on for an entire page such that by the time the reader gets to the end, they’ve forgotten what the subject of the sentence was in the first place.  Further, the conventions of the Victorian age in which James wrote required discretion and obliqueness; hence, the book is frustratingly vague, alluding to corruption and evil on the part of the ghostly servants and the children but never describing anything concrete. That didn’t seem scary to me at all.

Only when I watched The Innocents, Jack Clayton’s 1961 film adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, a few years later did I finally appreciate the material. Film can’t afford to be as open-ended as print, so this movie gave more substance to the original story by spelling out Quint and Jessel’s sexual debauchery. It also rounded out the characters, bestowing a name on the unidentified governess at the center of the story and showing Miles’s maladaptive behaviors. Above all, the movie was filled with a sinister atmosphere, contrasting lush daytime settings with shadowy nighttime scenes and always pervaded by the haunting ballad. The performances of the child actors Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin were especially compelling. The Innocents quickly became a new favorite horror film and I added it to my annual Halloween viewing.

After repeated exposure, my attention occasionally drifted and my mind wandered to adjacent topics. During one viewing as I watched Flora depart Bly for the last time, I thought in passing, Flora is going to need a ton of therapy after this. From that point, my imagination started running. I considered how the trauma of living at Bly with semi-abusive caregivers following on the death of her parents and then compounded by the sudden death of her beloved brother in her absence must have affected Flora in adulthood. I imagined her grief-stricken, bitter, and hardened. Louise Gluck’s poem Gretel in Darkness, which depicts the fairy-tale heroine trying to cope with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder after escaping the witch with her brother, proved influential as I also tried to extrapolate from fiction what the real consequences to a survivor of the events James depicted might be.

However, I was also guided by the portrayal of Flora in The Innocents. Though she’s a sweet and charming little girl, she also possesses a macabre streak, as underscored by her dialogue. Young Flora happily chatters away to her governess about the walking dead with the same enthusiasm as she discusses her prospects of becoming an artist. I envisioned grown-up Flora would maintain a tendency toward the morbid, sharpened by her personal hardships. Flora boldly stares at darkness instead of shutting her eyes to it like so many other people. Hence, my Flora would be drawn to horrors, both real and fictional.

A fortuitous discovery fueled my enthusiasm for writing a sequel to The Turn of the Screw. While browsing a used bookstore near my workplace (in the space that was once a Borders), I spotted A Casebook on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, 2^nd Edition edited by Gerald Willen (and published in 1969, the same year Quentin appeared at Collinwood). It was sitting on top of a pile of unrelated books at the end of the aisle as if waiting for me to spot it.  The book contains various academic essays analyzing the novella, offering insight into what the story has meant to readers and literature professors over the years. Much more valuable to me was the inclusion of four brief letters from Henry James to various correspondents in which he mentions The Turn of the Screw. One of those correspondents was F. H.W. Myers, a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research and author of Human Personality and Its Survival After Bodily Death. The letter is frustratingly brief (basically, James talks about gardening and makes excuses for not replying sooner), and while I dearly wish I could have seen Myers’s original letter, the reference to it was enough to give me confidence in my own interpretation of the book.

One last matter of importance was deciding when to set my book, which I had already decided to call Innocent. James’s original book doesn’t specify a time frame for the events, though it’s implied they occurred in the early or mid-1800s. The fashions in The Innocents suggest the story takes place in the 1860s. Other adaptations have taken place in the 1920s, the 1960s, and the 21^st century. I chose the early 1900s for Innocent (shifting the original events to the late 1880s); this felt like a natural break between the dark, repressive past and a more enlightened future. It also gave me the opportunity to draw on timely developments in history and literature and give Flora’s character a more modern flair.

Even though I felt inspired and had ideas I wanted to implement, I was hesitant to write Innocent. The Turn of the Screw is a monumental work of horror literature. Who was I to dare try to build on it? Moreover, I wasn’t even a fan of The Turn of the Screw; I liked The Innocents. Writing a sequel was an endeavor better suited to someone who had a better handle on the source material. Then too, I didn’t feel I knew enough about fin de siècle England to write a credible historical novel. Really, Innocent was a book I wanted someone else to write so I could read it, not something I wanted to mess with myself.

Eventually, I did start the work of doing historical research to bolster my novel. Judith Flanders’s works were very helpful. I got side-tracked by a new idea for a book about a chimpanzee in a haunted house just as I was finally about to begin writing Innocent, and I shifted gears to that project for a few years. For one reason or another, it took almost ten years from the time I first conceived of Innocent to actually write it, and now, it will finally be available as a paperback and e-book this Fall.

Rather than maintaining pure Jamesian canon, my artistic decisions owe more to The Innocents, though I did incorporate certain aspects of The Turn of the Screw. Actually, I drew from multiple adaptations of James’s material, including Joyce Carol Oates’s short story “The Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly,” the 1974 television film of The Turn of the Screw directed by Dan Curtis, the creator of Dark Shadows, and even the 1971 prequel film The Nightcomers. My book represents a sort of unified field theory of The Turn of the Screw.

I considered what would be the most likely outcomes following the end of the original story—for the governess, for Flora. I imagined non-conformist Flora seeking answers to questions similar to those I had had at the end of that story about just what happened at Bly. For people who might not be familiar with the original story, I introduced a new character, Gerald Braddon, a solicitor working for Flora, who would be introduced to her history as background to his investigation of the Bly affair.

I’m excited to finally bring Innocent into the world and hope you will all join me in welcoming it.