Review by Booklist Review
Ghosts roam the bridge between the living and dead, emerging in moments of grief and change in these haunting short stories. The first section, "Devices," explores loss through modern technology. In one tale, a woman discovers an app on her phone that simulates texts and calls from her recently deceased husband. But her turbulent relationships with her spouse and sister, who had initially dated him, come to light. The other portions of the book, "Places," "People," and "Visitations," are aptly labeled for the nature of their paranormal disturbances, with each story falling further and further into the spiritual realm. Some of these sagas even bleed into one another. For example, "A Fur Coat" and "Boots" weave dueling perspectives of a couple who is tormented and driven apart by a nefarious spirit in an abandoned house. Winterson (Frankissstein, 2019) cleverly ends each section with an anecdote of her own experience with the supernatural. A bewitching collection for readers of horror and mystery, with just the right twists.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Winterson (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?) delivers a memorable collection of ghost stories, interspersed with snippets of her own supernatural encounters. While there is some exploration of how spirits might inhabit new technology--in "App-Arition," one woman's dead husband visits her through an app on her phone--most of the stories take place in more traditional settings: a creaky manor house, a castle with a tragic past, an eerie London home. Standouts include "A Fur Coat" and "Boots," a pair of back-to-back stories that tell his and hers versions of one couple's harrowing winter at the "unlived-in, run-down" Crashley Estate. Max discovers a fur coat in a wardrobe and later hears a phantom baby crying at night, while her partner, Jonny, is approached by a spectral gamekeeper with an unsettling tale about the house's former inhabitants. Many of the protagonists "live alone" because they "prefer it," a proclivity that seems to leave them vulnerable to otherworldly visitors. Winterson includes four personal essays of her paranormal experiences, the final of which, "The Future of Ghosts," sees Winterson raising intriguing questions about the "haunting" of the metaverse: "If you enjoy a friendship with someone you have never met, would you know if they were dead?" These supernatural tales are satisfyingly disconcerting. (Oct.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
