The Beguiled (Movie Tie-In): A Novel
The Beguiled (Movie Tie-In): A Novel book cover

The Beguiled (Movie Tie-In): A Novel

Price
$16.00
Format
Paperback
Pages
384
Publisher
Penguin Books
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-0143132400
Dimensions
0.9 x 5.4 x 8.1 inches
Weight
11.2 ounces

Description

“[A] mad gothic tale . . . The reader is mesmerized with horror by what goes on in that forgotten school for young ladies.” — Stephen King, in Danse Macabre “An unjustly forgotten historical tale that highlights how children are broken and reshaped by war: Each woman shares the narration, and each shares a heartbreaking tale of loss, separation and resilience.” — OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network “Terror and excruciating suspense . . . A book whose headlong momentum and mushrooming horror vex and frustrate the reader who seeks to put it down and go to bed . . . An absolutely magnificent read.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer “There aren’t many shows or books that treat jealous women like real people. . . . Enter The Beguiled. [Cullinan] makes jealous women human.”xa0— Wellington Square Bookshop (Exton, PA) Thomas Cullinan (1919–1995) was a novelist and playwright, as well as a writer for television. In addition to The Beguiled (1966), he wrote three other novels— The Besieged (1970), The Eighth Sacrament (1977), and The Bedeviled (1978)—as well as several plays, which are still produced. He received a Ford Foundation grant to represent the United States at a literary colloquium in Berlin in 1964, and he wrote a weekly television program in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, both for WKYC, a local television affiliate, and for Case Western Reserve University. The Beguiled was made into a film twice: in 1971, starring Clint Eastwood and Geraldine Page, and in 2017, directed by Sofia Coppola and starring Nicole Kidman, Colin Farrell, Kirsten Dunst, and Elle Fanning.

Features & Highlights

  • The basis for the major motion picture
  • directed by Sofia Coppola—named best director at the Cannes Film Festival for
  • The Beguiled
  • —and
  • starring Nicole Kidman, Colin Farrell, Kirsten Dunst, and Elle Fanning“[A] mad gothic tale . . . The reader is mesmerized with horror by what goes on in that forgotten school for young ladies.” —Stephen King, in
  • Danse Macabre
  • Wounded and near death, a young Union Army corporal is found in the woods of Virginia during the height of the Civil War and brought to the nearby Miss Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies. Almost immediately he sets about beguiling the three women and five teenage girls stranded in this outpost of Southern gentility, eliciting their love and fear, pity and infatuation, and pitting them against one another in a bid for his freedom. But as the women are revealed for what they really are, a sense of ominous foreboding closes in on the soldier, and the question becomes: Just who is the beguiled?

Customer Reviews

Rating Breakdown

★★★★★
30%
(297)
★★★★
20%
(198)
★★★
15%
(148)
★★
7%
(69)
28%
(277)

Most Helpful Reviews

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Creepy & unsettling

Definitely unsettling at times and pretty creepy when you're up late alone reading it, I was glad to have bought this book & can't wait for the film.
11 people found this helpful
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Read anything else.

I have the bad habit of finishing any book I start and I only read one book at a time. This book was a slog. A boring slog. I should have tossed it in the donation bin (or garbage) and started to read something more enjoyable but instead wasted my time on this. If this was supposed to give me insight into the Southern Civil War female mind, I would have had to conclude that they were all self-centered and insipid. But, it is fiction. Bad fiction. I often read books that are made into movies and I try to read the book first and then see the movie. Usually, I find the book better than the movie. But, I am going to bet that, in this case, the movie is better than the book. I, however, will never find out because I cannot believe the movie will be a hundred times better and It would have to be in order for it to be worth my time. The book was that bad.
9 people found this helpful
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Fabulous!

I've seen both film versions of "The Beguiled". I loved the Clint Eastwood film. I disliked the Sofia Coppola film. When I read the novel, I found that the Clint Eastwood movie was almost nothing like the original novel. Although I thought that movie excellent, it had little in common with the novel. And the Sofia Coppola re-make was much more like the book than the Eastwood film. Still, being truer to the book did not make it a good transfer to the screen. The novel was published in 1966. Little Amelia Dabney lugs Corporal John McBurney to the Farnsworth Seminary for Girls in hope that his life can be saved. (She loves nature and all living things.) I liked how the book was divided up into parts, with each character telling part of the story, and each character continuing where the last one left off. The names of the females in the book are mostly different than in the Eastwood movie. That could be confusing. But eventually you get to know each one and it is this key that unlocks the secret of the book's success. Just put both movie versions behind you and read "The Beguiled" on its own merit.
6 people found this helpful
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Predictable and Dull

This book was hard to get into. There are also typos in the book that made me want to burn the book itself. They said she hid behind a certain -instead of curtain. (Internally screaming!) There was another one but I can’t recall, and don’t really care. One is enough for me. There was no real climax. I kept reading, in hopes something would happen. And it never did. And I called the ending well before it was close to ending. I was expecting something more scandalous, and this was just a wet blanket of a book.
6 people found this helpful
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Gothic tale set in the American Deep South

An interesting book this one. It was good but not great and the pacing although should have been slow building was a bit too slow in the beginning. It’s quite a disturbing read in many ways – a solider arriving injured at a house in Virginia only to be tendered to by women who have no idea of the world outside. They at first feel threatened but it soon becomes clear that it might be him who should be afraid.
There are several girls who give their viewpoint of the events which unfold and I admit to getting a little confused over who was speaking although each chapter is signaled clearly. Sometimes it felt a little repetitive as one girl told the story of another in a different way. But on the whole, the tension, ghostly sequences ,sense of foreboding and danger runs throughout with only a few dips. There are some uncomfortable moments as some of these girls are under age and they are exposed to so much. I wasn't too keen on these moments.

The setting is what makes this book – a small plantation house with a mixed race woman, the house slave and white students in the middle of the Civil War and all that entails. The heat, the oppression, the sexuality and the sense of how on earth this is going to end kept me reading. And those frissons of excitement and the unknown, the mouse in a cage of cats, the mouse which fits back and then oh that ending. I think fewer characters and narrators would have been much more effective in the long run and a shorter novel.
3 people found this helpful
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:-(

this is a story with potential & will no doubt make a good film: when there is a screenwriter to shape & edit it, a director to pace & focus it, & most importantly, actors to create the characters. all of these things were beyond the author's capacities, however, so it is a disappointing book. a promising premise drones on, bleeds out, ultimately ending in a way that can only be described as "silly."

the story is told in relay fashion by the several characters, all of whom are very different, we learn from others' descriptions, but none of whom has a really distinct voice, except perhaps for the youngest, marie. they all sound the same; & none of them sounds southern. nor does the anti-hero sound irish. no character is fully realized, despite their individually interesting histories, & almost all are psychologically, as well as grammatically, inconsistent. there is neither a real story arc nor compelling style to hold our interest; worst, there is no tension whatsoever. ho-hum.

it is a creepy story & it might have been done so well by talented hands. a great disappointment & time-waster.
3 people found this helpful
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Four Stars

Very easy read and holds you captive until the end. Good writing and interesting characters.
2 people found this helpful
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A new favorite

This has always been one of my favorite movies so I was very excited to hear they were remaking it. THEN I found out it was a book! I ordered it immediately and started reading it the minute it was delivered. I have not been disappointed. This book will become one of my favorites I am sure.
2 people found this helpful
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I was pretty disappointed in this

for all the hoopla about the movie, I was pretty disappointed in this book
2 people found this helpful
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Beguiled

A little slow. A lot of internal dialogue, but interesting read.
1 people found this helpful