The Two Magics.

Henry James gathered two very different works together under a single title, and the pairing has been overshadowed ever since by the darker and stranger of the two: a ghost story so precisely and cunningly unsettling that readers still argue, more than a century later, over what actually happens within it. Together the pieces show James turning his famously subtle attention to the uncanny and the theatrical alike, and demonstrate how much menace a great stylist can build out of pure suggestion.

What it's about

The volume's celebrated tale follows a young and inexperienced governess who takes sole charge of two orphaned children at a remote and isolated country house, and who gradually becomes convinced that the estate is haunted by the malign, corrupting spirits of two dead servants. As her conviction and her fear steadily mount, so too does the reader's own uncertainty over whether the apparitions she describes are genuinely present or the mounting projections of an overwrought and lonely mind. James withholds any easy answer at every turn, and the resulting ambiguity is not a flaw to be resolved but the very substance and terror of the story. Its lighter companion piece offers a deliberate contrast, a more comic and worldly key that sets off the darkness of the ghostly tale.

Themes

Innocence and corruption, the deep unreliability of human perception, the influence of adults over children, and the peculiar terror that grows in everything left unsaid all run through the ghostly tale. James is endlessly fascinated by the gap between what a narrator sincerely believes and what may actually be true, and he builds his horror precisely in that gap, where the reader can never quite find solid ground.

Why it still matters

The governess's story became one of the most closely analysed works of short fiction in the English language, a founding text of psychological horror whose stubborn refusal to resolve keeps generating fresh readings in every generation. Its influence on the interior, ambiguous ghost story, in which the real haunting may be of the mind, is difficult to overstate, and its capacity to disturb has not dulled with age.

Who it's for

For readers who prefer their terror suggestive and psychological rather than explicit, for admirers of James's intricate and demanding style, and for anyone drawn to a story that will deliberately never tell you exactly what it means.