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A review by spenkevich
Night Side of the River by Jeanette Winterson, Jeanette Winterson
4.0
A lifetime of winding fairy tales and the fantastical with facts unstitched from time made it only natural for Winterson to approach stories of ghosts and death in an AI present. Now that I’ve returned to where I have a valid SIM card and internet access, I wanted to share some insights from Winterson having gotten to see her speak several times over the weekend at Hay Festival in Wales.
Winterson spoke about he experiences with ghosts and the history of ghost stories to propel a larger discussion around her most recent book, Night Side of the River, which I eagerly devoured when it came out this past autumn. For Winterson, it is only all too understandable that the past would somehow be contained within the present and the variety of ways we think about ghosts are manifestations of this. She even shared that she has her own ghost living in her house and he often frightens her girlfriend with loud thumps. ‘I know it’s a him because he’s needy,’ Winterson joked, ‘my ghost locked himself in the parlor the other day. And the door doesn’t lock so we had to take the whole apparatus off to get him out.’ Which all lead to intersecting with Winterson’s other current area of interest: the space of humans in an increasingly digital world. But what was most magical about it was…I finally got to meet my favorite author. I may have cried, but I got a hug.
After years of her books feeling like a comforting hug every time I read them, this was the best day ever. Well, on to the (original) review of this wonderful collection of stories, from which I got to listen to her read No Ghost Ghost Story.
‘There’s always a story, isn’t there? A story of somebody drowned, somebody murdered, somebody who died for love.’
Spending the days leading up to Halloween with Jeanette Winterson’s rather cozy ghost stories was a festive good time that made the season more enjoyable all around. Night Side of the River is a collection of ghost stories that vary from gothic tales of haunted houses and spectral visitations to stories that show modern technology as an expanding frontier for new forms of hauntings. These are all interspersed with insightful and intimate commentary by Winterson for a book where the thrills of these bite-sized narratives are also a vessel to examine ideas of life after death, love, loss and the significant literary qualities of the horror tradition itself. We see how the genre adapted to address the beliefs and existential anxieties of their times, making Winterson’s technology angle another step forward in its evolution. Many of her best themes find their way into these stories and while we only catch glimpses of the inimitable Winterson moments of prose practically flying off the page in astonishing aerobatics with the tales being more plot focused here, it all still charms and chills its way right into your heart. In short, Night Side of the River functions like a ghost tour through the season with Winterson as your knowledgeable guide, directing us to ponder the history and happenings while also ensuring a satisfying and spooky event.
‘She understands the advantage the Dead hold over the living; the Dead are not afraid.’
I’m quite smitten with these collections of seasonal stories Winterson has embarked on and in many ways this feels akin to her jolly [b:Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days|29502605|Christmas Days 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days|Jeanette Winterson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1475304381l/29502605._SY75_.jpg|49789855] collection. While that book of stories certainly helped make the season bright for me last year, Night Side of the River led me through the dark corridors and stormy atmosphere of Halloween and really brought the holiday to life. I enjoyed the touch that there are 13 ghost stories here, with 13 being a rather spooky number befitting the season much like how the Christmas collection had a story for each of the 12 days of christmas. Sure, they aren’t the strongest of stories Winterson has ever written, but this is easily overlooked because the full effect of the fiction and non-fiction approach to analyzing hauntings is so devilishly pleasant. And while these aren’t always the scariest of stories—I like to term them “cozy horror” here, particularly as they usually have happy endings, though if you want some actually frightening and unsettling Winterson horror I highly recommend The Daylight Gate—that also seems beside the point. Besides, as Winterson says in conversation with The Guardian, ‘I don’t get scared of the dead, it’s the living that scare me. I’m not worried about ghosts – I’d rather spend the night in a haunted house than in Romania with Andrew Tate.’ Overall, the collection invites us to lean in and enjoy this tour through the realm of the dead, not shrink from it.
‘I used to believe that life and death were separate states. Now I know that things are liquid, porous; not solid at all.’
There is a genuine love for the season and the literary traditions that accompany it that is endlessly infectious and the introduction essay alone is worth the price of admission (you can read an abbreviated version of it HERE in The Paris Review). Winterson looks at the long history of ghost stories and the way they can work as commentary on the general attitudes of the times in which they were created and why they’ve long captivated readers. ‘In spite of Protestant theology, scientific materialism, or the plain fact that there is no empirical proof that anyone has come back from the dead,’ Winterson writes, ‘ghosts have not been evicted from their permanent ancestral home: our imagination.’ This is part of what makes this collection so heartfelt is that it isn’t trying to make any big claims on ghosts—though Winterson does include several stories of hauntings she has experienced—but to ask us to think about what is so interesting about the ideas behind them. She recently addressed this in an interview with NPR:
The book really holds the door open to invite imagination and possibility, and she provides an interesting look at how authors have long done so and helped continuously shape the genre. She writes about [b:The Castle of Otranto|12923|The Castle of Otranto|Horace Walpole|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1390597628l/12923._SY75_.jpg|46432] in 1764, for example, and how it brought the Gothic atmospheres to ghost stories or [a:Washington Irving|28525|Washington Irving|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1218187394p2/28525.jpg]’s 1820 tale, [b:The Legend of Sleepy Hollow|721012|The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories|Washington Irving|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1309285607l/721012._SY75_.jpg|18197624], with ‘themes distinctive to the American Gothic – in particular, the undertow of the land itself, its bloodstained colonisation returning as a series of hauntings.’ Of course she mentions [a:Edgar Allan Poe|4624490|Edgar Allan Poe|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1454522972p2/4624490.jpg], as the gambling scene in The Passion with life or death stakes was written as an attempt to write a Poe-like story. She even provides a few of her favorites like [a:M.R. James|2995925|M.R. James|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1254798756p2/2995925.jpg] or Susan Hill’s [b:The Woman in Black|37034|The Woman in Black|Susan Hill|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327869942l/37034._SY75_.jpg|2127172] and one could make quite a spooky reading list from these pages.
I really love her approach to categorizing the stories here, although I do wish Devices—the technology-based stories—were moved to later in the collection as it isn’t the strongest start. But I am particularly fascinated by her choice to include stories addressing Places and People, a distinction on hauntings she addresses in the introduction. We often think of haunted houses traditionally as a haunted space that assails those who enter. However, she looks at authors like [a:Nathaniel Hawthorne|7799|Nathaniel Hawthorne|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1291476587p2/7799.jpg] bringing in ‘the psychic fractures and guilty disturbances peculiar to the pioneering spirit’ in his fiction it begins to ask ‘are such hauntings from the outside or the inside?’ This is also present in [b:The Turn of the Screw|12948|The Turn of the Screw|Henry James|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1567172392l/12948._SY75_.jpg|990886] by Henry James where we must ask ‘Is the manipulation a direct haunting? Or does Bly feed off the haunted places in the heads of its inhabitants?’ and Shirley Jackson’s [b:The Haunting of Hill House|89717|The Haunting of Hill House|Shirley Jackson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327871336l/89717._SY75_.jpg|3627] certainly shows the house more as a mirror reflecting a haunted mind back on itself. So, as the names of these sections suggest, each addresses a different form of haunting. There is the method of ‘you are haunting yourself,’ as the narrator advises herself in the first tale, App-arition, or, as is theorized in The Door (one of my favorites) ‘Maybe that’s what a haunting is: time trapped in the wrong place…haunted place working as a memory store.’ It’s all quite fun.
As a side note, I've always the way [a:Stephen Graham Jones|96300|Stephen Graham Jones|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1631159041p2/96300.jpg] offers two distinctions on haunted houses: the Stay Away Houses and the Hungry Houses. ‘Whereas Stay Away Houses just want to be left alone,’ Jones writes, ‘Hungry Houses aren't complete without people to digest for reasons or decades or centuries.’ In these stories Winterson tends towards the Hungry Houses, though this makes sense based on her influences in Poe, James and Jackson and the way a psychological haunting is better geared at examining the genre mechanics.
‘To honour you is to live. To love you is to live…I promised you I would live. Not a half-life, not a haunted life, not a shadowlife.’
Winterson also includes what she terms “hinge stories” that are printed back to back and offer two different perspectives on the same situation. I really enjoyed this approach to give a more dynamic look at the events but also to address differing ideas on ghosts in general. As one would expect with Winterson, we get some really lovely, philosophical ideas expressed. Such as thoughts on death as an interruption on life and questioning if that interrupts love.
There are many different depictions of what comes after death here, and a few humorous thoughts such as ‘Who gets to be reunited? Is the Afterlife polyamorous?’ I also enjoy how, for a collection that addresses haunted homes, it also considers the common phrase that death is a sort of “returning home”:
Through these stories we see a lot of love and loss, and I enjoy how these themes are the primary focus to examine. The spooky settings make excellent adornment for such investigations and it also asks us to consider what our own thoughts on death and ghosts says about us.
‘Truly, technology is going to affect our relationship with death. In theory, no one needs to die. In theory, anyone can be resurrected. We can be our own haunting.’
It seems only natural with Winterson that she would take the idea of haunting and look towards the future with it. AI is a topic of interest for Winterson, such as her collection of essays [b:12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next|58527285|12 Bytes How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next|Jeanette Winterson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1625925240l/58527285._SY75_.jpg|86107455] that look at how the technology might impact the way we love and interact or how it gives Mary Shelley’s ideas a new life as she played with in Frankissstein. ‘We have unexpectedly created an opportunity for the dead,’ she writes about concepts like the metaverse and apps that can mimic texting as if from someone you knew now gone and explores how a dead person living on in a virtual world isn’t unlike a haunting. ‘It seems to me like a perfect space for ghosts,’ she says and I will never look at online interactions the same again. Maybe I’m actually a ghost haunting you right now.
‘When i am climbing, i understand that gravity exists to protect us from our own lightness of being, just in the same way that time is what shields us from eternity.’
I have to say, Night Side of the River was an ideal was to spend spooky season and having new material from Winterson is always a joy. This is charming and insightful and I really enjoyed the way she plays with themes as a way of examining the literary implications and pushing the boundaries of them. She certainly makes you see the phrase "ghost in the wires" in a new light here too. A spooky treat that I can’t wait to revisit every October.
4/5
‘Does the door open when we are born, to let us into this life? we won't notice it again until we are done, until it's there at the top of the stairs, waiting for us, our entrance then, our exit now.’
Winterson spoke about he experiences with ghosts and the history of ghost stories to propel a larger discussion around her most recent book, Night Side of the River, which I eagerly devoured when it came out this past autumn. For Winterson, it is only all too understandable that the past would somehow be contained within the present and the variety of ways we think about ghosts are manifestations of this. She even shared that she has her own ghost living in her house and he often frightens her girlfriend with loud thumps. ‘I know it’s a him because he’s needy,’ Winterson joked, ‘my ghost locked himself in the parlor the other day. And the door doesn’t lock so we had to take the whole apparatus off to get him out.’ Which all lead to intersecting with Winterson’s other current area of interest: the space of humans in an increasingly digital world. But what was most magical about it was…I finally got to meet my favorite author. I may have cried, but I got a hug.
After years of her books feeling like a comforting hug every time I read them, this was the best day ever. Well, on to the (original) review of this wonderful collection of stories, from which I got to listen to her read No Ghost Ghost Story.
‘There’s always a story, isn’t there? A story of somebody drowned, somebody murdered, somebody who died for love.’
Spending the days leading up to Halloween with Jeanette Winterson’s rather cozy ghost stories was a festive good time that made the season more enjoyable all around. Night Side of the River is a collection of ghost stories that vary from gothic tales of haunted houses and spectral visitations to stories that show modern technology as an expanding frontier for new forms of hauntings. These are all interspersed with insightful and intimate commentary by Winterson for a book where the thrills of these bite-sized narratives are also a vessel to examine ideas of life after death, love, loss and the significant literary qualities of the horror tradition itself. We see how the genre adapted to address the beliefs and existential anxieties of their times, making Winterson’s technology angle another step forward in its evolution. Many of her best themes find their way into these stories and while we only catch glimpses of the inimitable Winterson moments of prose practically flying off the page in astonishing aerobatics with the tales being more plot focused here, it all still charms and chills its way right into your heart. In short, Night Side of the River functions like a ghost tour through the season with Winterson as your knowledgeable guide, directing us to ponder the history and happenings while also ensuring a satisfying and spooky event.
‘She understands the advantage the Dead hold over the living; the Dead are not afraid.’
I’m quite smitten with these collections of seasonal stories Winterson has embarked on and in many ways this feels akin to her jolly [b:Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days|29502605|Christmas Days 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days|Jeanette Winterson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1475304381l/29502605._SY75_.jpg|49789855] collection. While that book of stories certainly helped make the season bright for me last year, Night Side of the River led me through the dark corridors and stormy atmosphere of Halloween and really brought the holiday to life. I enjoyed the touch that there are 13 ghost stories here, with 13 being a rather spooky number befitting the season much like how the Christmas collection had a story for each of the 12 days of christmas. Sure, they aren’t the strongest of stories Winterson has ever written, but this is easily overlooked because the full effect of the fiction and non-fiction approach to analyzing hauntings is so devilishly pleasant. And while these aren’t always the scariest of stories—I like to term them “cozy horror” here, particularly as they usually have happy endings, though if you want some actually frightening and unsettling Winterson horror I highly recommend The Daylight Gate—that also seems beside the point. Besides, as Winterson says in conversation with The Guardian, ‘I don’t get scared of the dead, it’s the living that scare me. I’m not worried about ghosts – I’d rather spend the night in a haunted house than in Romania with Andrew Tate.’ Overall, the collection invites us to lean in and enjoy this tour through the realm of the dead, not shrink from it.
‘I used to believe that life and death were separate states. Now I know that things are liquid, porous; not solid at all.’
There is a genuine love for the season and the literary traditions that accompany it that is endlessly infectious and the introduction essay alone is worth the price of admission (you can read an abbreviated version of it HERE in The Paris Review). Winterson looks at the long history of ghost stories and the way they can work as commentary on the general attitudes of the times in which they were created and why they’ve long captivated readers. ‘In spite of Protestant theology, scientific materialism, or the plain fact that there is no empirical proof that anyone has come back from the dead,’ Winterson writes, ‘ghosts have not been evicted from their permanent ancestral home: our imagination.’ This is part of what makes this collection so heartfelt is that it isn’t trying to make any big claims on ghosts—though Winterson does include several stories of hauntings she has experienced—but to ask us to think about what is so interesting about the ideas behind them. She recently addressed this in an interview with NPR:
‘I like to play with the form. I thought, well, why not break in as myself and talk about things that have happened to me that I can't explain away? So I was showing that I've got some skin in the game here, that these things have been part of my reality, and I don't understand it. And simply, I have to live with it. And, you know, we're in a world now that's always looking for easy answers, quick-fire solutions. Nobody likes to say, I don't know. And this is a book about saying, I don't know. And when it comes to the supernatural, I think that's the most honest answer.’
The book really holds the door open to invite imagination and possibility, and she provides an interesting look at how authors have long done so and helped continuously shape the genre. She writes about [b:The Castle of Otranto|12923|The Castle of Otranto|Horace Walpole|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1390597628l/12923._SY75_.jpg|46432] in 1764, for example, and how it brought the Gothic atmospheres to ghost stories or [a:Washington Irving|28525|Washington Irving|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1218187394p2/28525.jpg]’s 1820 tale, [b:The Legend of Sleepy Hollow|721012|The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories|Washington Irving|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1309285607l/721012._SY75_.jpg|18197624], with ‘themes distinctive to the American Gothic – in particular, the undertow of the land itself, its bloodstained colonisation returning as a series of hauntings.’ Of course she mentions [a:Edgar Allan Poe|4624490|Edgar Allan Poe|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1454522972p2/4624490.jpg], as the gambling scene in The Passion with life or death stakes was written as an attempt to write a Poe-like story. She even provides a few of her favorites like [a:M.R. James|2995925|M.R. James|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1254798756p2/2995925.jpg] or Susan Hill’s [b:The Woman in Black|37034|The Woman in Black|Susan Hill|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327869942l/37034._SY75_.jpg|2127172] and one could make quite a spooky reading list from these pages.
I really love her approach to categorizing the stories here, although I do wish Devices—the technology-based stories—were moved to later in the collection as it isn’t the strongest start. But I am particularly fascinated by her choice to include stories addressing Places and People, a distinction on hauntings she addresses in the introduction. We often think of haunted houses traditionally as a haunted space that assails those who enter. However, she looks at authors like [a:Nathaniel Hawthorne|7799|Nathaniel Hawthorne|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1291476587p2/7799.jpg] bringing in ‘the psychic fractures and guilty disturbances peculiar to the pioneering spirit’ in his fiction it begins to ask ‘are such hauntings from the outside or the inside?’ This is also present in [b:The Turn of the Screw|12948|The Turn of the Screw|Henry James|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1567172392l/12948._SY75_.jpg|990886] by Henry James where we must ask ‘Is the manipulation a direct haunting? Or does Bly feed off the haunted places in the heads of its inhabitants?’ and Shirley Jackson’s [b:The Haunting of Hill House|89717|The Haunting of Hill House|Shirley Jackson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327871336l/89717._SY75_.jpg|3627] certainly shows the house more as a mirror reflecting a haunted mind back on itself. So, as the names of these sections suggest, each addresses a different form of haunting. There is the method of ‘you are haunting yourself,’ as the narrator advises herself in the first tale, App-arition, or, as is theorized in The Door (one of my favorites) ‘Maybe that’s what a haunting is: time trapped in the wrong place…haunted place working as a memory store.’ It’s all quite fun.
As a side note, I've always the way [a:Stephen Graham Jones|96300|Stephen Graham Jones|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1631159041p2/96300.jpg] offers two distinctions on haunted houses: the Stay Away Houses and the Hungry Houses. ‘Whereas Stay Away Houses just want to be left alone,’ Jones writes, ‘Hungry Houses aren't complete without people to digest for reasons or decades or centuries.’ In these stories Winterson tends towards the Hungry Houses, though this makes sense based on her influences in Poe, James and Jackson and the way a psychological haunting is better geared at examining the genre mechanics.
‘To honour you is to live. To love you is to live…I promised you I would live. Not a half-life, not a haunted life, not a shadowlife.’
Winterson also includes what she terms “hinge stories” that are printed back to back and offer two different perspectives on the same situation. I really enjoyed this approach to give a more dynamic look at the events but also to address differing ideas on ghosts in general. As one would expect with Winterson, we get some really lovely, philosophical ideas expressed. Such as thoughts on death as an interruption on life and questioning if that interrupts love.
‘Death, though, is a different reality. You are dissolved. Into what? Into time, into space, into the leaky container that is me, who will also dissolve into time, into space. No. 80 on the PeriodicTable, you are gone. But before I take up my role as the long-suffering one – the gold-band-wearing survivor who was always there and is still – I am aware that mercury makes possible the extraction of gold from poorer-quality ores. You brought out the best in me.’
There are many different depictions of what comes after death here, and a few humorous thoughts such as ‘Who gets to be reunited? Is the Afterlife polyamorous?’ I also enjoy how, for a collection that addresses haunted homes, it also considers the common phrase that death is a sort of “returning home”:
‘Home is inside us as well as outside us. An image we hold in our minds. Some people like to say that when we die we are going home. But it’s a strange home. We never visit it, until we do, and when we do, we never return.’
Through these stories we see a lot of love and loss, and I enjoy how these themes are the primary focus to examine. The spooky settings make excellent adornment for such investigations and it also asks us to consider what our own thoughts on death and ghosts says about us.
‘Truly, technology is going to affect our relationship with death. In theory, no one needs to die. In theory, anyone can be resurrected. We can be our own haunting.’
It seems only natural with Winterson that she would take the idea of haunting and look towards the future with it. AI is a topic of interest for Winterson, such as her collection of essays [b:12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next|58527285|12 Bytes How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next|Jeanette Winterson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1625925240l/58527285._SY75_.jpg|86107455] that look at how the technology might impact the way we love and interact or how it gives Mary Shelley’s ideas a new life as she played with in Frankissstein. ‘We have unexpectedly created an opportunity for the dead,’ she writes about concepts like the metaverse and apps that can mimic texting as if from someone you knew now gone and explores how a dead person living on in a virtual world isn’t unlike a haunting. ‘It seems to me like a perfect space for ghosts,’ she says and I will never look at online interactions the same again. Maybe I’m actually a ghost haunting you right now.
‘When i am climbing, i understand that gravity exists to protect us from our own lightness of being, just in the same way that time is what shields us from eternity.’
I have to say, Night Side of the River was an ideal was to spend spooky season and having new material from Winterson is always a joy. This is charming and insightful and I really enjoyed the way she plays with themes as a way of examining the literary implications and pushing the boundaries of them. She certainly makes you see the phrase "ghost in the wires" in a new light here too. A spooky treat that I can’t wait to revisit every October.
4/5
‘Does the door open when we are born, to let us into this life? we won't notice it again until we are done, until it's there at the top of the stairs, waiting for us, our entrance then, our exit now.’