There’s an art to putting a story collection together, though what it looks like varies depending on who you talk to. Some say to put the best story first. Others say put a zinger at the end. I’ve heard the third story can be the most crucial because if a reader is going chronologically, that might be the one that makes them decide to keep reading or move on. And of course, a good collection has a thematic element, a thread that runs through the stories or otherwise ties them together.

All that said, it’s rare to find a collection whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When it does happen, it’s magic. Absolute magic.

In Jeanette Winterson’s Night Side of the River, this magic is front and center. You don’t need to guess the thematic element of the book — ghost stories; it’s right there on the cover — but what she does with that theme, the way she plays with it, is like a master jeweler cutting and polishing dozens of facets of an opal so that whatever angle you approach it from, you see something dazzling.

The collection consists of 13 stories, a fittingly spooky number. These are divided purposefully and attentively into four sections — Devices, Places, People, and Visitations — and at the end of each is a mini essay (or “personal intervention”) about the author’s own experiences with the supernatural and provocative thoughts about our humanity, our society, and what comes after.

Big questions get asked here, both in the stories and in Winterson’s reflections. What is waiting for us in the afterlife? What are ghosts? What does being “haunted” really mean?

Of course, Winterson doesn’t have all the answers, but her speculations create something complex and thought-provoking nonetheless. On top of all that, the stories themselves are highly entertaining and satisfying — and yes, pretty spooky.

It’s clear from the book’s thorough historical introduction that Winterson has taken her ghost-story writing seriously, drawing on influences from Dante, Washington Irving, Mary Shelley, Stephen King and everyone in between, weaving gothic, classical, literary, and sci-fi elements into her work. These stories cover a lot of territory and vary in tone and scope. Some are sad, some are witty. I laughed out loud at the antics in “Canterville and Cock,” while the paired stories “A Fur Coat” and “Boots,” with their axe murderers and jump scares and hidden creepy rooms, gave me goosebumps. In other stories, we meet skeptics and believers, con artists and grievers. There are haunted houses, haunted people, haunted clothes.

Winterson is at her best, though, when she goes beyond the scary aspects of ghosts and explores deeper concepts like grief. In the brilliant, paired tales “No Ghost Ghost Story” and “The Undiscovered Country,” two lovers are parted by death, and it’s heartbreaking to bear witness to each of their desperate desires to cling to a reality that no longer exists.

“Towards the end of your life, you promised me that if it were possible, you would send a sign,” the narrator of the first story says about his lost love. Later, he ponders that too-familiar adage that you will be reunited with your loved ones on the other side. “It would be awkward if we were, don’t you think? I am not the one and only person you have loved…Is the Afterlife polyamorous?”

Meanwhile, in “The Undiscovered Country,” the narrator’s lover is losing his identity, “coming apart…A man without a story to tell. A story without a man to tell it?” As he slips away, he tries hard to give his lover one final sign — a literal beacon of light, a glow through a radio. “Love doesn’t leave me, but I am leaving me, and I am leaving you. I am sorry.”

It’s the little asides, the breaking down of the familiar and trite things we say to each other about death, the close examination of the complex emotions of grieving, the reckoning of the wrenching finality of death, that make these stories shine.

Winterson is also unafraid to ponder how technology — specifically AI and the metaverse — plays into the idea of ghosts in our modern world. “Technology is going to affect our relationship with death,” she writes in one of her essays. “In theory, no one needs to die. In theory, another can be resurrected. We can be our own haunting.”

Can we die if we have an avatar in an alternate reality? And if ghosts are our spirit selves, freed of bodies, will they find their way into these tech-driven worlds? Or, perhaps most chilling, does our move as humans to spend so much time online mean that, in some ways, we’re already ghosts?

“If you enjoy a friendship with someone you have never met, would you know if they were dead?” Winterson asks. And does it even matter when we can — and do — constantly reinvent ourselves and our relationships through technology? She explores these ideas about alternate realities and humanity in “Ghost in the Machine,” a story in which the main character, who’d rather spend time as an avatar than in her real-life, less-than-glamorous job, reflects, “In the metaverse, the past doesn’t have to get in the way of the present. You can have the past you deserve.”

But Winterson is also a master at blending these very modern ideas with classical gothic, tense storytelling. In the first story in the collection, “App-arition,” which is a particular standout, we meet Bella, a woman returning from her husband’s funeral. Her sister, in what seems to be a caring gesture, tells her that she’s signed Bella up for a new app that has digested her late husband’s emails, text messages, voicemails, and other information and can message her as if he’s still alive. As the story unfolds, we begin to see not only the flaws of this plan, but also revealing truths about the marriage. It’s an astonishing, wickedly smart tale with all the markings of a classic ghost story and all the relevance of our current tech-driven world.

Bouncing between the living and the dead, Winterson’s prose is mostly spot-on, although I was pulled from the narrative a few times by abrupt tense changes, sometimes mid-paragraph. Overall, though, this is a superb collection that offers many interesting reflections on who we are and where we go when we are no more. Some of Winterson’s characters find the afterlife a welcome respite — a cozy cottage that allows them to leave behind a life on Earth where they didn’t belong. Others long for their former world and linger in it to cause trouble, to finish something unresolved, or simply because their will to live is too strong.

“I must not let go,” says the narrator in the collection’s title story. “I must remember my name. Say your name. Again. Again. Again.” In her tales of the dead, Jeanette Winterson shows us what it means to be alive.

Tara Laskowski is the author of the suspense novels The Mother Next Door and One Night Gone, the latter of which won the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards for best debut novel. Her third novel, The Weekend Retreat, will be published in December 2023.

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