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.
In a sequence of editorial interventions, she relates uncanny anecdotes of her own. She asserts her ambivalence...only to quickly renounce it... She makes intriguing connections between mind-body dualism and AI technology, then veers without warning into fringy prognostication ... Winterson finds safer ground when she decamps to more traditional settings. She has always been a fabulist at heart, most at home when weaving virtuosic dreamscapes about transitory selves, and what could be more hallucinatory than a haunting? ... In such moments, we glimpse Winterson the artist at her most potent, melding the viscerally real with the lavishly supernatural. Repeatedly, though, we are jolted from these experiences by her in-person expostulations.
Winterson takes loving liberties with the form ... These are the well-trodden imaginative territories of the fireside yarn-spinner, the gothic novelist, the Victorian spiritualist and the modernist subjectivity-warper ... Winterson avoids pastiche, largely through the steady release of intensely portrayed and skilfully deployed emotion ... Punctuating the stories are four autobiographical vignettes in which Winterson recounts her own experiences with the otherworldly.
The book opens with a lively trot through the history of our obsession with spooks, and how this came to the fore as the grip of religion diminished ... It’s always been one of Winterson’s best qualities that she doesn’t give a damn, but here there is at times a sense of carelessness, enhanced by random switches between past and present tense for no clear reason in one story and mid-paragraph viewpoint shifts in another.
The wry intelligence of Jeanette Winterson seems well suited to a collection of ghost stories ... [Memoiristic] sections are so enjoyable that occasionally the stories suffer by comparison, feeling less tangible, to use Winterson’s word, because of course, they are ... [An] intriguing and unusual collection.
In the tales themselves the effect would be greater if Winterson relied a little less on genre convention ... The problem here...lies in Winterson’s explanatory reflex.
Even if we assume that most readers are here for the stories, this collection has very little to offer anyone familiar with the last 200 years of ghost stories written in English. Winterson adds flourishes like virtual reality gear, and in one story, she suggests that we might live on as digital avatars. Even as she’s riffing on a long tradition of spooky tales, she writes as if she doesn’t understand how they work and why they endure. For one thing, most of these stories seem to lack purpose.
