Several years ago, Jeanette Winterson released a collection of 12 Christmas stories that were so delightful and well written that I've returned to them again almost every holiday season since. Now, with NIGHT SIDE OF THE RIVER, Winterson has given readers another selection of richly evocative, beautifully told stories. But in this case, readers might want to revisit them annually around Halloween, since this time it's a collection of ghost stories.

Winterson begins with a wonderful overview of ghost stories throughout literature (she points out that even the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest piece of literature we know, is a kind of ghost story), which not only grounds readers in a vast and varied literary tradition but also sets the stage for some of the allusions she works into the stories that follow. In between each of these tales, Winterson includes a first-person essay --- or, as she puts it, "personal interventions" about her own experiences with the supernatural.

"NIGHT SIDE OF THE RIVER will expand readers' understanding of what ghost stories can be --- the perfect companions for the long dark evenings of fall and winter."

These stories are divided into four broad sections: People, Places, Visitations and Devices. Winterson, who frequently has addressed technology in her work, opens the volume with Devices, where a story entitled “App-arition” finds a recently widowed woman increasingly unnerved (for reasons that don't become entirely clear until the twist ending) by the app designed to simulate communication with her late husband. Places is clearly inspired by haunted houses…or, as Winterson's late writer friend Ruth Rendell put it, the idea that "buildings themselves trap and release the energy."

Some of these stories border on the grotesque or terrifying, while others are quietly sad or even beautiful. Nowhere is this contrast more apparent than in two pairs of "hinged stories," where readers view the same set of circumstances from two different perspectives. In "A Fur Coat" and "Boots," a pair of circus folks almost destroy themselves (and each other) when they con their way into six months at an abandoned country home and find their perceptions horrifically altered by what they see and hear there.

Contrast those with the achingly lovely pair of "No Ghost Ghost Story" and "The Undiscovered Country." In the first story, a man who recently has lost the love of his life searches --- he believes in vain --- for evidence of his loved one's lingering presence. In the second story, that deceased lover tries --- he believes in vain --- to make his presence known to the man he loves, to comfort him even as he feels his own humanity slipping away: "I am here because I love you and that is not forgotten not lost not diminished not weakened not faded. It needs no punctuation. No explanation. Love doesn't leave me, but I am leaving me, and I am leaving you. I am sorry."

Ghost stories are not always scary or even unnerving --- Winterson's pieces prove that beautifully --- but they can awaken the imagination to a new sense of possibility. They also can provide vivid reminders that the past is still with us, whether in the form of a departed mother who seems to appear around every corner or in the shape of a mountaineer with one last message to impart. NIGHT SIDE OF THE RIVER will expand readers' understanding of what ghost stories can be --- the perfect companions for the long dark evenings of fall and winter.