The Brooklyn Rail

Winterson is a master of the craft, and this collection is no exception—a comforting reminder that there are still writers for whom the music of language is as important as plot. In a world so full of rapid content production, meaning and language are too often sacrificed. And Winterson is asking questions that humans have been asking for eons. In her introduction, she gives a compelling invitation with the question, “Do you believe in ghosts?” suggesting that “a significant number of people who don’t believe in a god continue to believe in ghosts.” Because, yes. Things happen that we can’t explain. I used to (not so) jokingly say that I don’t believe in ghosts except in New Orleans. But grief and life can change us from non-believers into a space where we think, “well, maybe.” As Winterson writes, ghosts have existed as long as we have been able to imagine them. Religion and the Enlightenment didn’t erase them, but instead simply shifted the ways we speak of ghosts in the West—often showing up in late-night storytelling, films, and fiction.

The collection is structured in four sections: “Devices,” “Places,” “People,” and “Visitations,” each ending with a brief non-fiction vignette. The thirteen stories explore different types of hauntings, including “a few … where place [is] integral to the haunting,” others that give the dead a chance to speak. For Winterson, the age-old debate between science (materiality/rationality) and religion (the life of the soul) becomes almost moot as technology makes it possible to “upload” the self or to create “new” life via AI. The stories in “Devices” focus on how technology can create a space of haunting: an abusive dead husband torments his widow (“App-arition”), a woman constructs a more appealing virtual life (“Ghost in the Machine”), and a member of the “Dia-normal Club” gets lost between the real and virtual in the very creepy “The Old House at Home.”

Often characters are vulnerable to hauntings due to their aloneness in liminal spaces: “If the dead are present, contact with the living seems to happen at times of heightened stress—either for an individual or for a whole country.” Contact can also be very place-specific. In “The Spare Room,” the narrator is recently divorced and moves into a space that reflects their emotional state: “living in a space between lives,” renting an old house in an ancient part of London. A spare room builds into a site of terror with unexplained noises, scents of cigarettes and oranges, and a face at a window that can’t exist.

In two linked stories, gothic horror arises out of the past through two tangible objects, “A Fur Coat” and “Boots.” A couple cons a man into letting them stay in his guest house where there is no heat, no electricity, no internet. In the darkness, ghosts arise that nearly destroy both of them. Both stories are perfectly paced with chilling moments: “It was that night that she heard the baby crying,” and “Jonny had never used an axe before.” In “The Door” a couple travels to Scotland to marry in a very gothic castle with a violent past: “Massy, dark, brooding, part-ruined, part-restored.” The twist ending is essential Winterson and the prose sings: “Her eyes are grey, like the sky over the sea today, and behind them, not always visible, but always there, is the sun.”

The study in grief, “No Ghost Ghost Story,” and its companion, “The Undiscovered Country,” are two of the strongest in the collection—Winterson’s ability to show intimacy between two people really shines. William has died and Simon is stumbling through his days, acknowledging “that grieving means living with someone who is no longer there.” He doesn’t believe in ghosts but imagines being haunted by Simon. Simon fails to reach William: “I wish I could tell him that life is all we have.” When Simon finally discovers a way to connect, it’s deeply moving. In contrast, in the acerbically comic “Canterville and Cock,” a man creates haunted evenings for paying guests until one night, an actual ghost shows up—her revenge is darkly amusing.

“Visitations,” features three eerie tales. “Thin Air” is a very English take on the Swiss Alps with references to Arthur Conan Doyle and the Inferno Ski Race. A group of English travelers in a mountain inn at night tells ghost stories. One of the parties follows a mysterious stranger with glacial blue eyes and a missing “ice axe” into an old part of the hotel, and then there’s a twist that’s terrifying and incredibly sad. Equally sad is “Fountain with Lions,” though these ghost(s) seem more content with their fate than the wild despair in “Thin Air.” Finally, there is the terrifying “Night Side of the River” featuring another woman in a liminal space. She fights back, although she gives perhaps the central message of the collection: “I used to believe that the world is dry land with firm edges. I used to believe that life and death were separate states.”

Winterson’s vignettes explore the spaces between, offering up possible explanations for ghosts, including carbon monoxide-induced hallucinations from gas lamps, and the relationship between ghosts and avatars. She’s interested in the digital life technology offers but her musings on our need for ghosts are more interesting: “scrubbing away all traces of the supernatural hasn’t worked too well for the human psyche. There is … a pressure release, that comes with being able to say, ‘I can’t explain this.’” Perhaps that’s why we tell ghost stories, why we love a haunted house. In a culture that tries to over-explain every part of our existence, maybe a little mystery is necessary: “It might not be a bridge to elsewhere, but perhaps it is a blessing.” This is a gloriously crafted collection that serves to spark deeper discourse into the nature of life (and death), and also offers up spooky tales for armchair adventures best read in the rising dark.