The Ghosts of Henry James: Tales for the Halloween Count-down--If You Don't Mind Verbiage

Looking for something spooky to read at Drawn and Quarterly's Haunted Bookstore evening October 30, I began reading Henry James's various weird tales. 

James is such an aristocratic writer with such a convoluted style that ghost stories are not what immediately spring to mind when his name is mentioned.  But the darker side of life comes through in several of his tales. 

Specifically there's The Turn of the Screw, set in a properly Gothic English estate whereThe Jolly Corner is a novella I read when doing my James seminar as a senior at university, and which profoundlly troubled me.  So did The Beast in the Jungle in which it's quite clear that the well-bred world that James lived in and wrote about is much stranger than one would think.
a new governess discovers some strange goings-on that affect the children in her charge. 

But as I dipped into the tales I was frankly annoyed by James's stylist contorsions.  The man never used one word when a paragraph with three dependent clauses would do.  None of the stories have the directness that would connect with Halloween-crazed young'uns today, so I (not too unhappily) decided to look elsewhere.

At the moment I'm considering reading from an adapted version of a story from my last collection, The Truth Is.  Called "Nothing but Good Times," it has a weird old lady who talks about the Force and God, and an ending that is sort of spooky now.  Perhaps if I tweak it some, it will do....