NIGHT SIDE OF THE RIVER

Speculative stories and essays about what comes after death—and after reality as we understand it now.

Winterson’s last novel, Frankisstein (2019), demonstrated that she has a sincere appreciation for horror and science fiction and understands how these fantastic genres create a space in which we can ask big questions. In 12 Bytes (2021), she shared her thoughts about how technology, from Ada Lovelace’s protean computer programs to Artificial General Intelligence, changes not just how we experience the world but also how we comprehend ourselves. In this collection, she presents modern ghost stories alongside essays about what ghosts have meant to us historically and how they might manifest in a post-human future. Regrettably, it feels like a step backward for her, though the essays might be compelling to readers who have never given much thought to the concept of an afterlife or technological change. “Religion can be considered as humankind’s first disruptive start-up—what’s being disrupted is death” is a creaky attempt to apply contemporary jargon to prehistory, followed by a lot of spurious theology. But 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. Even though Winterson’s subjects are life and death, there seldom seems to be much at stake here. More significant, though, is that the menacing specter who appears in “A Fur Coat” and “Boots” is the only truly frightening phenomenon in the whole book. There are, however, some poetically chilling lines here and there, such as, “Maybe that’s what haunting is: time trapped in the wrong place.”

Winterson somehow manages to make ghosts boring.