I spotted this softcover at Barnes and Noble today and couldn't resist it! It's an anthology of holiday-themed horror stories, edited by Golden and featuring contributions by some of my favorite authors. It includes some seriously horrifying stories, as well as some that are more whimsical. Among my favorites:

"Christmas in Barcelona" by Scott Smith, which opens with a bickering couple and their infant as they suffer through the stress of travel - from the child screaming through the flight to the exhausted parents' attempts to find their hotel and settle in. That alone would make it a horror story {wry grin} - but things seem to improve once they get some rest, and then they stumble across a vendor with some charming - if well-worn - toy figures for a creche. The story takes the concept of animals speaking at midnight on Christmas and heads off in a bizarre and nightmarish direction... I haven't been so surprised by a story's conclusion in a long time!

"Good Deeds" by Jeff Strand is a darkly comic riff on such saccharine items as the bathos-ridden song "The Christmas Shoes," leading to a cursed video - yeah, very weird, but it made me laugh.

Elizabeth Hand's "Farrow Street" is another travel-horror tale - a young woman whose usual holiday hosts cancelled at the last minute decides to use her plane ticket anyway, but winds up in London at Christmas with no reservations, no realization of how many shops close on the holidays, etc. While out walking in the slushy snow, desperate to find ONE pub or restaurant or even a McDonald's that's open, she stumbles across a gaily-it house, and... Yeah, things could get worse!

"Honor Thy Mother" by Angela Slatter opens like a typical advice-column question about where the grown offspring should spend the holidays - the narrator is upset that her sons seem to defer to their wives about this. She's had to strongarm them into visiting her this holiday - but it turns out she has a very surprising reason. Truly horrifying ending to this one.

Tim Lebbon's "Home" seems like a post-apocalyptic trek, with an aging man rather aimlessly wandering the frozen landscape with a bizarre little sidekick - but when they encounter a settlement that still has some living beings in it, the true nature of the wanderers becomes apparent. Stealth-horror here; I'll never think of the elves at the North Pole in quite the same way...

"Hiking Through" by Michael Koryta is built around the true - and tragic - tale of Geraldine Largay, who got lost while hiking the Appalachian Trail even though only being a couple of miles from the trail itself; her remains weren't found for a couple of years, and at that time it was learned that she'd survived almost a month, alone and starving. The story pays homage to her ordeal, but spins it into a ghost story, one that catches up with the narrator in gently chilling fashion.

"The Hangman's Bride" by Sarah Pinborough features a young orphan boy who's taken in by a chimney sweep, and spends time in the difficult and dangerous work of crawling through soot-choked flues. But when he's tasked to do this in the sumptuous home of the hangman, he finds the flues haunted by a ghost, a long-stringy-dark-haired girl with terrible eyes... Oddly enough, for such a creepy beginning, this story has the most touching resolution of anything in the book!

In addition, there are creepy mummers, melting children (makes sense in context), a fad for genetically modified pets, a magical disappearing knife, a vengeance-motivated Christmas gathering, and more.

I left this book on top of one of the gas pumps at the Mutual station near the MA/NH border; hope the finder enjoys it!

[See other recent releases in MA here.]

*** Released for the 2018 Spook-Tacular October release challenge. ***

*** Released for the 2018 Tick Tock release challenge, for the embedded "AM" in the title. ***