...entirely original ... She creates these temporal collisions by combining her own original text with found images, and the results are exceedingly uncanny ... All of the vignettes suggest hauntings of one kind or another—supernatural, psychological, metaphorical—and each left me unsettled but riveted ... Other vignettes in Guestbook resist easy description. But that’s the beauty of this book ... Guestbook draws eerie, tantalizing power from moments of confusion.
Guestbook is not exactly a book of ghost stories, though its subtitle disagrees. It behaves more like a short story collection than any other literary form, but reading it feels akin to walking through an art exhibit, each piece linked in ways that are ineffable but clear ... Without fail, [the book is] unexpected, subtle and moving. Shapton excels at evoking emotion through absence, which is, perhaps, a skill borrowed from more traditional ghost stories ... Guestbook is a profoundly sympathetic work, and one filled with yearning. That yearning, like a ghost, lingers long after the stories are done.
While Guestbook’s subtitle is 'Ghost Stories,' the exquisite minimalism that defines Shapton’s style hews much closer to verse than prose. Shapton’s thoughtful layout of text and her use of images sets a deliberate, poetic pace. She invites her readers to slow down, to linger, to let the language percolate ... As with a traditional ghost story, what’s left out and unseen is purposeful, powerful, and just as important as what’s actually there. And just as ghost stories are passed down and retold, Guestbook encourages us to further develop the narrative ourselves ... Through the immersive, wholly original reading experience of Guestbook, Shapton has bested herself yet again, masterfully elevating the ghost story form to new heights. Here, poetry is arranged as prose, and poems challenge our perception. They require looking as much as they do reading, and morph back and forth into titles, headlines, annotations, captions, or fragments pulled from a diary. The book is also a vehicle by which Shapton destabilizes timeless symbols of death and ghosts, creating an exhilarating visual and poetic performance...
At first glance Guestbook appears more like an exhibition catalogue than a collection of ghost stories. This is a piece of trickeery of the sort that the writer and artist Leanne Shapton has cultivated for thirteen years, telling her stories through both words and images ... Death, however, is the big thing here; a fog seems to hang over Shapton’s pages. To potentially banal subject matter...she brings an inflection of uncanniness ... At other points...when it seems Shapton is venturing into conventional ghost story territory, only for the narrative to an end abruptly and without explanation. Yet this is arguably one of the qualities that makes Guestbook a collection of ghost stories of the disoriented twenty-first century, not least in its various online guises. Here are 'Ghosts. Not ghost stories'...
... none of the thirty-plus entries in Guestbook, which proclaim themselves, through a subtle debossing on the book’s cover, to be 'ghost stories,' is a ghost story in the typical sense, although many do reference ghosts or the uncanny ... Others present like riddles, juxtaposing words and images that challenge us to discover a through-line ... There are shades of W.G. Sebald and Edward Gorey in Guestbook’s randomness, sly humor, and reliance on crepuscular, black-and-white photos and artwork. As with the latter, Shapton revels in a kind of gothic inexplicability and ominousness. Her unanchored, fragmented texts, and the images that accompany them, tend to focus on banal lives in media res. There’s a gently voyeuristic element here, too: The rough amateurishness of its imagery can make Guestbook feel like a riffle through someone’s sock drawer (a lack of prurience stops me saying underwear). Mortality being a constant presence, the general mood is melancholic ... [a] mesmerizing book.
Guestbook is strange in the way that being haunted must inevitably be strange. The book arrives with an unexplained photo tucked inside, the first of dozens of small mysteries that lurk around this uncomfortable volume. This is not a conventional collection of short stories ... Some stories are less clear in their purpose ... Other pieces are anti-stories ... Guestbook is best appreciated as a portable art installation. The book is enigmatic at every turn, but gorgeously realized. It pushes the boundaries of both 'ghost' and 'story,' and the discomfort that it creates crawls beyond the covers of the book and into the mind, haunting long after the last page.
Guestbook is divided into 33 numbered chapters combining fragments of text and found images. Nominally a collection of ghost stories, it’s a messier affair than Shapton’s other books: ‘ghosts’ can cover almost anything. The stories are vivid and impressionistic, and seem to have been built around whatever caught Shapton’s eye: old Christmas wrapping paper; hand-tinted photographs of roses and sunsets; watercolour reproductions of the final sequence from Visconti’s Death in Venice; black and white snapshots of blurred figures and leafless trees; a sculpture, in soft white stone, of a woman turned away, as if protecting a secret ... Running through the book is a question about hospitality: how do you treat uninvited guests? Several stories express a fear of mirrors, doubles, photographs – all the hungry ghosts that try to sneak in ... Others seem written from the perspective of the ghosts themselves, cold, lonely, waiting in the dark for someone to notice them.
Paradoxical though it may be, sometimes an old cliché is the best way to describe something new. Icebergs are proverbially ninety percent underwater; ninety percent of what makes this new collection so remarkable is what occurs off the page, in the blank places between its sparse text and its abundant images ... Guestbook may bear the subtitle 'Ghost Stories,' but the ghosts are often metaphorical and the stories implied. These stories unsettle, but they’ll make no one jump in fright; Shapton elicits shivers of unease, not shudders of disgust ... Not for everyone, but essential for some.
...diffuse and eerie, more often mood than assertion or plot ... Shapton's vignettes are at their strongest when she imagines the hidden lives of inanimate objects ... There's often a playfulness to her texts, too ... A strange and haunting art project.
...clever and evocative ... Shapton inventively explores the space between presence and absence, craftily blending images and text to articulate what cannot be explained, only sensed, making for a uniquely haunting and uncanny work.
