A Midnight Clear

September 9, 2019
The whimsy of the holiday season turns dark and absurd in this wickedly amusing anthology of six stories. Jolly elves are forced to try the North Pole’s first murder case in Sam Hooker’s “The Dauntless.” Alcy Leyva’s hilarious “Tidings of the New Moon” inverts classic werewolf tropes when a well-to-do wolf is bitten by a wild human. Laura Morrison’s “Movin’ On Up” also remixes a familiar story: three demons, darker versions of Dickens’s Christmas ghosts, visit a saintly woman slated to die on Christmas morning and pitch her on spending the afterlife in hell. In Cassondra Windwalker’s “The Poetry of Snow and Stars,” a family spends Christmas in a haunted hotel where their holiday is derailed by a mysterious death. A young girl with a dying uncle learns the importance of the cycle of seasons in Dalena Storm’s “Sleep, Sweet Khors.” Seven Jane’s “Snow Angel,” the weakest of the six, follows a harried single mother so preoccupied with the logistics of the season that she forgets the true meaning of Christmas and turns to ice. This selection of darkly comic yuletide stories is perfect for horror readers who appreciate a bit of holiday spirit.

October 1, 2019
It's a fallacy to think that horror stories and the winter holidays have been separated until the modern era. A Christmas Carol contained frightening ghosts, and the folk tales featuring Krampus were enough to scare children into behaving well before Santa came. It is true, however, that this combination of spooky tales and holiday cheer has recently grown in popularity. The six entries in this anthology ride on the wave of creepy Christmas and wintry tales. From a trip to Estes Park, Colorado, where a murder occurs in the now infamous Stanley Hotel, to a woman trying to save her soul after her Christmastime death in South Florida, each story tells a bleak tale from the most wonderful time of the year. The stories are each imaginative in their own right, and even with writing styles that range from well-written prose to a little clunky, this is a quick read that will be a balm to those who like their holidays a little horrifying.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)