A few months ago, I reviewed the much talked-about Netflix television show The Haunting of Hill House. And as requested, I’m back with a review of the follow-up season The Haunting of Bly Manor! Like Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor was created for Netflix by Mike Flanagan and it features many of the same actors, but it is not a direct sequel. Instead, while Hill House took on Shirley Jackson’s most famous novel, Bly Manor tackles the works of another beloved American author, Henry James. Loosely inspired by James’s ghostly novella The Turn of the Screw, with plot elements from a few of his other stories thrown in, the nine episodes of The Haunting of Bly Manor debuted on Netflix on October 9, 2020—just in time to be the perfect mid-pandemic binge. Continue reading Review of Netflix’s The Haunting of Bly Manor
Tag: Henry James
Gothic Tropes: The Unreliable Narrator
This is one of my favorite gothic tropes. Often used in horror or mystery, an unreliable narrator is a first-person narrator of a story whose words the reader is not meant to take at face value. The narrator may be deliberately lying or their words may be influenced by unconscious bias or delusions. In the case of gothic fiction, it is most often this last reason that causes many narrators to be considered unreliable. Continue reading Gothic Tropes: The Unreliable Narrator