Because “discretion is of the utmost importance.” (Also because this family is up to no good.)īy this point, maybe you’re ready for something outside the reliable Turn of the Screw template-so consider this international bestseller (and winner of France’s prestigious Goncourt prize). There’s just one very twenty-first century complication: Sarah must agree to sign an extremely restrictive NDA. She doesn’t have good employment references, or any experience dealing with kids, but her new employers offer her the gig, anyway. Sarah finds work caring for a small child in a penthouse apartment on New York City’s upper west side. Here’s yet another nanny taking yet another job in yet another glamorous dwelling. But when she arrives at the house, she’s surprised to find she’s the only adult on the premises.

Once again, we have a nanny venturing to a strange house to care for two small children. With This House is Haunted, Boyne travels to 1867 to offer his own unique variant on The Turn of the Screw. Is it any wonder things start going bump in the night?īoyne is no stranger to writing about bygone eras his WWII holocaust fable The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a fixture on many high school reading lists, and his magnificent saga The Heart’s Invisible Furies chronicles seventy-some years of life in Ireland. The interview brings plenty of warning signs (the last few nannies have abruptly quit one of the children sobs “it’s not safe here…”) but Rowan takes the job, anyway. This high-tech update on Henry James finds a nanny named Rowan taking a job in a mansion full of surveillance devices and smart-home technology. The title gives a not-so-subtle nod to Ware’s inspiration. Its fans include everyone from Stephen King to Gillian Flynn, and 2020 brought a nine-episode adaptation on Netflix: The Haunting of Bly Manor. For decades, this Henry James novella was a staple of high school curriculums (if you have to persuade teenagers to read 19th century literature, I guess it helps to have a ghost).

We begin with the Grand Dame of every ghostly nanny novel-a book that established all the ground rules much like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice created the template for contemporary romcoms.

Novelists and Hollywood screenwriters have been riffing on the story for nearly 125 years! Here are six of my favorite books featuring inquisitive nannies, creepy children, supernatural forces, curiously distant parents, disapproving housekeepers, and so much more. These are the broad strokes of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, and my novel Hidden Pictures plays with the formula by moving the action to an affluent New Jersey suburb and adding tons of creepy black-and-white drawings (the child in my story is an artist prone to violent illustrations).īut I’m hardly the first writer to be inspired by The Turn of the Screw’s plot and mood.

This house is haunted lib e john boyne