In this collection, Jeanette Winterson turns her fearless gaze to the realm of ghosts, interspersing her own encounters with the supernatural alongside hair-raising fictions. Lifting the veil between the living and the dead, Winterson spirits us away to a haunted estate that ensnares a nomadic young couple in its own dark past, a staged immersive ghost tour gone awry, a West Village séance that threatens the bounds between AI and reality, and a vacation home in the metaverse where a widow visits an improved version of her deceased husband. Gloriously gothic and unnervingly contemporary, Winterson examines grief, revenge, and the myriad ways in which technology can disrupt the boundary between life and death.
For Jeanette Winterson, ghost stories are not old-fashioned or anachronistic in the modern world, but both cutting-edge and primal ... Not every story in the book is meant to be scary; some delight in the clever juxtaposition of ghost tropes and technology ... But Winterson’s strongest stories follow characters haunted not just by apparitions but by human bigotry and traditional, toxic gender roles ... The ghosts hardly need to show up at all, Winterson knows; the terror’s already present in the misogyny of the living.
So, do you believe in ghosts? Winterson isn't out to convince anybody, but she does include her own experiences with the supernatural ... Unsurprisingly, grief and loss resonate throughout the rest of the ghost stories, which are mostly the traditional variety ... On my scare-o-meter, the highest level of which is being too frightened to reach around a door frame to flip on a light switch for fear of being grabbed and dragged to hell or something equally horrific, Night Side of the River doesn't quite cut it, but that's a high bar, to be sure. Instead, Winterson's ghost stories do something much worse/better: They will haunt you.
A collection of ghost stories that range from campfire-level spooks to speculative reflections on the meaning of life ... What animates most of these stories is the idea of free-floating consciousness ... Her own answer, playing out in these stories, might not be entirely convincing or all that enlightening — even as the venture manages to be as challenging and entertaining as anything undertaken by this endlessly ingenious writer.
