Christmas and Other Horrors: An Anthology of Solstice Horror (2023) edited by Ellen Datlow
Some varieties of spectral Yuletide
Readers unfamiliar with Christmas and Other Horrors may prefer to read these notes only after reading the anthology.
It is a credit to the writers of Christmas and Other Horrors that they can present richly imagined and complex seasonal tales -- tales they must have written in warmer climes and seasons.
The writing is of high order, and will be appreciated by readers who want to enjoy unique approaches to traditional material. Not all the stories here are about Christmas; not all are folk horror, not all subvert traditional seasonal themes. Some writers just seem to be enjoying themselves as they do what they love.
* * *
"The Importance of a Tidy Home" by Christopher Golden takes place in Salzburg on the fifth of January, Epiphany. The end of Christmas. Homeless recovering addict Freddy and his friend Bern witness the Schnabelperchten as they arrive to make sure cleanliness of residents' homes is up to their standards. If not, the Schnabelperchten will offer correction using the large shears hung from their belts.
* * *
The 'He' in "The Ones He Takes" by Benjamin Percy is Santa. How does he make his gifts for the worthy? Child labor. And where does he get the laborers? The kids select themselves when they steal treats parents put out for Santa. Greta and Joel Leer learn this when their lost son Isaac returns home Christmas morning, a year after disappearing.
Joel joined Greta. He touched her but not the boy. Her cheeks were wet from crying. “It’s him,” she said. “It’s our little boy. He came back to us.”
Joel wanted—desperately—to believe. He was almost there. He gave her a stiff smile and did not mention the boy’s eyes. Isaac’s had been green. The boy staring back at them had eyes that gave off the strange blue light of glaciers.
* * *
"His Castle" by Alma Katsu takes place the night of Mari Lwyd in an isolated Welsh Airbnb, "a barely renovated farmer’s shack."
On their once-a-decade return to home ground, Londoners Cate and Trevor are visited by a trio of lumpen proletarians. The three men are half-hearted and resentful celebrants, however. They are using the holiday as a cover for theft.
But for them, alas, tables are quickly turned in this excellent story.
* * *
Perhaps the real horror of living in Australia is that 21 December marks not the winter but the summer solstice. It's an appalling thought, even for those of us only half-indoctrinated into fashionable nouveau-Yule habits.
"The Mawkin Field" by Terry Dowling is about an isolated piece of New South Wales farm land. It is permeated with wrongness.
Dowling's style here is a terse first-person from an outsider to the area, a natural gas surveyor for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). He meets a local brother and sister whose father vanished in the titular field on the previous solstice after spotting "something jigging about."
Then it struck me.
“You don’t have a scarecrow yourself.”
“Do now,” Geoff said. “That’d be you, Col.”
And I really did think of the movies and the solstice and harvest yarns that had those endings. And I really did feel a quick grab of fear.
“How you figure that?”
Geoff smiled. “Look see.”
And there was Bamby walking back from the house, carrying what looked like a garden stake and a hammer....
* * *
In "The Blessing of the Waters" by Nick Mamatas two brothers-in-law square off on a cold winter night in early January. One is the local Greek Orthodox priest, the other an escaped convict and mob enforcer. Nasos, the fugitive, has come to beg Father Gus to reinstate his local church's annual blessing of the waters" on Long Island Sound marking the Theophany holiday.
“Look, if those things were down there and the only reason they don’t come up and start eating people like on the late late movie is because we bless the waters every Epiphany, why were they asleep for thousands of years beforehand? Why didn’t they pop out of the Sound and eat all the Montauks? Or the Puritans, when they came, or those Lutherans your papou and Harry Pappas bought the church building from back in ’73?”
“Maybe the Indians had their own blessings. Maybe it’s pollution, global warming, those earthquakes that came when they started fracking. I’m just telling you, Father. Gus,” said Nasos.
"The Blessing of the Waters" takes a shocking and powerful turn near the end, creating an unexpected climax. Mamatas expertly conveys his characters uncertainties and misgivings over their lives and interactions with each other. Sorrow at mutual failings as brothers-in-law will outlast any threat an Epiphany ritual might thwart for another year.
* * *
"Dry and Ready" by Glen Hirshberg depicts a family remnant carrying-out a private yearly ritual demanded by a husband and father on his deathbed. Aliyah takes the lead, dragooning her angry, resentful mother Shoshana and angry and resentful teen daughter Aza. Aliyah wants to recall devotion on all sides.
The moment he’d made her promise. Saddled them with this task, forever. Gifted it to them. The lighting of the candle. Saying of the blessing. Feeding of the words. “So they know they’re remembered.”
Not so I know, Aliyah thinks, now—her thoughts whirling, wild—as she lowers her mother into the backseat, with more force than she usually applies.
What did you think you were making here, Dad? And laying on us? A mitzvah, or a threat?
The feeding of the words. Any words. So his monsters don’t come looking for the company they missed?
The site of this ritual is a reclaimed landfill. This is where Aaliyah's father spent his life, re-enriching soil and shaping animal sculptures: crude simulacra of real animals, open-mouthed to the world and ready to accept paper prayers. Shoshanna writes down curses in lieu of prayers – or are they for her identical? Aza pretends to deliver paper prayers from all three of them into the waiting mouths. Aliyah initially cheerleads to make the best of a bad situation.
We are all golems, Aliyah thinks. Mud and clay momentarily illuminated by wind and light. Animated by the promise we found in our mouths at the moment we were born.
The three women to-and-fro over familiar ground in their arguing and in the park. It's a discussion we feel resumes for them each year.
Hirshberg shines in depicting the particularity of a family of women raised on decades of neglect by a man they wanted for themselves as husband and father. Yet we are near delight when his judgment on their conflicted devotion seems ready to melt all that is solid.
* * *
Garth Nix uses tension in several different ways in "Last Drinks at Bondi Beach," each of them effective. All contribute to an atmosphere of insubstantiality and menace, of mistaken understanding. The story epitomizes the shaping power of ostranenie for the horror mode in fiction.
I have forgotten. I sleep too much. I forget.
Sixteen thousand times around the sun and one hundred and fifty-one more. Will you… will you be strong enough, Mother? You will drink Ricagomor to the final death?
I will. Ricagomor is the last of my enemies. The last feast—
(…)
What was that?
Naught. Dust upon my tongue.
What of those who were here before even our first waking? The original powers of this land?
They have gone deep, their people slain, scattered. I do not think they will interfere.
We should not be here. But we must be. If Ricagomor is here. You’re sure she is here?
I told you so.
You have seen her?
No, I dare not approach her earth! I do not wish to slake her thirst. Yet she is here. I am your daughter. I know.
My daughters, my lovely daughters…
Concentrate, Mother! She is here. She hides in her place of strength. But she cannot hide tomorrow.
The one day. Festival…
She will come out. She must drink, but who can she drink from? Only her lesser offspring, the mortals of her line. That is all she has.
"Last Drinks at Bondi Beach" is a brief story. Nix uses third person present tense and relies almost entirely on dialogue as both action and exposition. For those who enjoy Carmac McCarthy, there are no quotation marks here, either, for elliptical and cryptic dialogue.
Stylistic choices allow Nix to avoid miring his story in explanatory details. Elements of both vampire and folk horror fiction are present, though the authorial voice is not concerned with illuminating. or aiding any fair play readers may feel is their due.
* * *
"Return to Bear Creek Lodge" by Tananarive Due is subtitled "December 26, 1974." It begins as a story about arrivals – coalescing a family gathering only coincidentally related to Christmas. Fourteen-year-old Johnny has a premonitory dream as he and his mother arrive to visit her mother, the unspeakable Mazelle Washington.
And the woman sitting there.
In his dreams, Grandmother doesn’t look the way she did the last time he actually saw her, when she was already emaciated and sharp-jawed from illness. This is Mazelle Washington the way she has immortalized herself in her photos framed all over her house: hair hanging long and loose (straightened, of course), in radiant makeup, shoulders nestled in the fur collar of her shiny silk bathrobe, the kind of garment only movie royalty would wear. She shines so brightly that the light seems to glow from her.
Something rustles just beneath her on the porch steps, snow flung aside by a long neck and then a head with a snout the size of a long weasel, white fur almost camouflaged by the snow. It rises between Grandmother’s knees… as if she is giving birth….
"Return to Bear Creek Lodge" is a powerful story filled with sinuous and insidious resonances. The story's historical context is the downfall of the old, successful black bourgeoisie whose fortune's rested on businesses that thrived in the interstices of the Jim Crow United States.
Grandmother’s lodge would seem like an ordinary two-story wood frame house if it weren’t so secluded in the Rocky Mountains woods. Its isolation alone made it seem luxurious to have electricity lighting the windows, or a fence claiming five or six acres. Thirty yards from the main house, three small cabins stood in a perfect triangle as relics of a time when Bear Creek Lodge had provided dignity to Black celebrities lucky enough to get an invitation. In those days, fine hotels nationwide did not accept them, no matter who they were. Once, he’d been told, Grandmother had her own ski lift for her guests.
But all of that had been a long time ago.
Mazelle Washington, once a popular player in Jim Crow Hollywood, retreated to the Rockies once film goers started criticizing her role in a power structure swept away by the mass proletarian civil rights movement's victories. "They were forgetting her, or worse: calling her a coon. Oh, she hated that word."
Johnny and his mother live in upscale Baldwin Hills. For each, this return to Grandmother's house is perilous. In several unanticipated ways it will also be horrific, if not downright monstrous.
* * *
“Are we still going to do the other stuff?” said Jordan wearily from the sofa.
“It’s a holiday tradition,” Laura replied.
“Not a good one.”
“Please. I don’t want to have this argument again. I was doing this year’s before we met and if I have to do it by myself I will.”
Jordan got up and said, “Relax. I’m sorry I brought it up. I’ll get the nail gun.”
With that, Laura and Jordan began the final touches securing the house.
Trauma, and intergenerational trauma, are today's critical buzzwords.
Richard Kadrey's story "The Ghost of Christmases Past" begins with trauma's aftermath. Laura, twenty years after her brother's Christmas-time disappearance, can only cope by turning her house into a survivalist redoubt. Whatever holiday folk monsters got her brother will return to finish her, too.
As Laura and her contractor husband Jordan do their annual kibitzing about therapy and divorce, Kadrey begins applying deft cutbacks to the primal scene where Laura watched her brother devoured.
But is Laura's memory of that trauma accurate? Kadrey poses a question: can we ever see the world accurately from the prison-cell of obsessive-compulsive remembrance?
And: what if one day we are forced to see our traumas from another angle? Might they be recognizable as the source of our liberation?
* * *
"Our Recent Unpleasantness" by Stephen Graham Jones starts cool and detached. We are enticed by the tone: informal, third-person shifting easily into second-person for the stream-of-consciousness asides and parenthetical perorations. We are quickly made agreeably attentive to this novella-length serving of suburban life.
Suburbs, of course, are supposedly ticky-tacky vales of normalcy inhabited by the lonely crowd. But of course they are not.
In 1978, Robert Sheckley published a short story about the unexpected things of protagonist spies from his apartment window using Army Surplus binoculars. The story was called "Is That What People Do?" "Our Recent Unpleasantness" has a similar premise: things seen by a husband on his evening dog walk, decompressing after work and reclaiming a little humanity before heading home for dinner. "Our Recent Unpleasantness" is more ambitious than the Sheckley, and its pervasive atmosphere of what Wodehouse used jocularly to call "The Impending Doom" is enough to give the reader shortness of breath.
The story takes place on the day of the winter solstice over four consecutive years. It's always two seconds shorter than the previous day. Our hero Jenner ultimately fears he might be crossing back into that two second gap during his neighborhood walk.
Jones is a master at intensifying the normal until normal characters gently kidding themselves take on the suggestive characteristics of automata in an allegory staged by Coppélius. So, when the denouement arrives, it is shattering -- shattering in the jigsaw-with-a-missing-piece sense. I previously experienced this condition when reading Jones's "The Spindly Man" (2014).
It's the two seconds, you see.
When you step into your own darkness on a night where the borders are already weak, you can step through, and fall into yourself.
* * *
As "All the Pretty People" by Nadia Bulkin begins, it's time for Candice's yearly holiday party. The old gang are all in attendance. With one exception. They have been friends since grad school, and all still live in the D.C. area.
“It’s nice you guys do this Festivus thing,” said Monica.
Candice’s voice automatically calibrated to a higher, hostess pitch. “I think so! We started it in grad school, so we could get together before everyone went home for Christmas. It’s crazy how hard it gets to find time to actually see each other outside a group chat.”
The very fact they’d all shown up was itself a Festivus miracle. By then, everyone in the group was at the rotten end of their twenties, when bills had started coming due and muscles had started seizing up and a creeping dread had begun to follow them to work, to happy hour, to the gym: the sense that they didn’t have a lot of time left, so they’d better get going to wherever they were going. Nina and Lawrence, for example, were going to rent a warehouse in Ivy City and open their own distillery. Marnie and Eddie were going to get married as soon as her contract with Wildlife International ended and she could come back from Tanzania for good, instead of just for Christmas. Sheldon was going to Kathmandu. Alan was going to get a promotion, and hopefully a girlfriend....
The story's title forewarns: this is a faux party celebrating a faux holiday, and all these pretty people are, by this time, only faux friends. Candice only misses her one genuine friend, Sam. Sam ghosted all of them in August, and never responded to the invitation text.
Holiday parties are supposed to be frictionless emotional reunions. But Festivus, by definition, has a surface flaw: it demands an airing of grievances.
And when this portion of the evening is announced, an unexpected guest -- prompt as any E. Nesbit revenant -- arrives.
"All the Pretty People" is a supernatural gem.
* * *
"Löyly Sow-na" by Josh Malerman is an understated trial-by-ordeal meet-the-parents nightmare. Its ironies are never at the expense of the parents and their traditions, or the daughter and her prospective mate. All are capable of dignity -- even the unlikeliest. Malerman handles the cutbacks (analepsis) perfectly; the location is efficiently delineated -- and free of melodramatic folk horror exoticism.
“No, no,” Russell said. “Honestly, I’m overheating. My mind is playing tricks. I feel fucked up.”
He stepped down onto another bench. Another.
Another.
More water on the rocks.
What are your motivations?
That gamey smell. Russell saw visions of two piano players swirling in the thick steam. Saw the woodpile. Black wood.
Wood demons…
Hard to hunt…
“Come on, come on.”
He stepped again, missed the next bench, fell forward, and—
“Got you,” Mikko said.
Mikko held Russell’s arm with one hand, the door open with the other.
“Let’s do it,” Mikko said.
Russell, wide-eyed now, watched the older man step through the changing room and onto the sauna porch. Russell followed. At the top of the steps, he looked back. To the window where, beyond, black steam swirled and orange rocks glowed in the sauna.
“Come on!” Mikko called.
Russell heard the splash. He walked to the end of the porch for a better look at the cottage. A light on upstairs? Maybe. He heard giggling. He turned fast.
Hannele was on the porch, a foot from his nose.
“Boo,” she said.
“Jesus!” Russell said. “You just freaked the hell out of me!”
“How goes it?” she asked. “I brought you some water in case Dad was only giving you beer.”
She held out the glass for him.
“Hannele!” Mikko called from the lake. “He’s gotta jump in before he gets too cold!”
“Okay,” Hannele said. “Go on! Jump in the water. Have you done it yet?”
"Löyly Sow-na" is a weird and joyous holiday horror story. Joyous? Yes; it makes explicit this genre subtext: horror stories allow us a chance to understand what we truly value. And sometimes allow us to make course corrections.
* * *
“Cold” by Cassandra Khaw is not a Yuletide cheer tale. Its winter is exhausting because it is the only season left.
Imbolc. That was the name for it, for when winter begins to feel the weight of its age and spring kindles like a cancer in its belly. In another life, it was a promise, a warning, an invitation to dream of when the evening sky would wear the sun like a crown. These days, such a celebration was extraneous, important only in the archaeological sense. No one had felt warm in years. Nonetheless, she would conduct the ritual – if only for one last time.
“Brede, Brede, come to my house tonight,” she said again. “I shall open the door for Brede and let Brede come in.”
The wind groaned a reply, and the candle glow grew dim.
“Brede, Brede,” she said, voice husked. “Come to my house tonight.”
She drew a sharp whistle of breath when nothing followed, closed her eyes, a palm rested on the pitted flat of the cleaver she had laid on one narrow thigh. The world quieted.
“Please.”
In answer then: a soft crackling, like wood in the fireplace or lake ice waking to the weight of an ill-placed foot….
“Cold” is a generic short story that tries to braid post-apocalypse horror's ennui and weltschmerz with fantasy's solipsistic habit of deus ex machina defiance.1 "Cold" takes place in a northern climate, in an enclave of human survivors that still "encyst" territory with their we-are-the-real-monsters behavior. Only magical survivalist thinking could still fantasize revenge in the world of "Cold."
* * *
"Gravé of Small Birds" by Kaaron Warren is a complex story filled with strange small-island lore, social jealousy, a peculiar Solstice-Christmas seasonal tradition, and some delicious recipes. Warren does a wonderful job depicting teamwork in a busy and successful kitchen.
She had the Brennan version of the old French Twelve Days of Christmas pinned to the fridge, like students did when trying to memorise the periodic table.
One Dressed Swan
Two Boiled Cranes
Three Suckling Pigs
Four Savoury Tongue Pies
Five Smothered Rabbits
Six Grape-stuffed Chickens
Seven Savoury Salads
Eight Patina of Fillets of Hare
Nine Poor Man’s Pies
Ten Quaking Puddings
Eleven Milk Fed Snails
Twelve Tiny Birds Cooked in their own Bone Gravé
Her acidic depiction of Jackie -- a Januskopf culinary genius head chef -- is accomplished.
* * *
As a lifelong resident of Ohio, "The Visitation" by Jeffrey Ford delighted me. Context:
[....] the belief and practice of what was called by old timers Heimsuchung, or “Visitation,” originated in those areas of Northern Germany where small groups of Vikings had settled. Before being assimilated by a Christian splinter group, transformed into a story of angels and Christ’s reward and revenge, the holiday practice began back in pre-history, in the age of Odin, a sleek creature of an idea of natural community that leaped out of the forest and mated with human imagination.
A belief in the Visitation, though not very popular even in the old country, somehow smuggled itself among the Amish and Mennonites voyaging to the New World on the Charming Nancy in 1736. There was a handful of the sect known as the Church of the Angels of Accord—bible-centric beliefs with a few appropriated folk beliefs disguised in Christian trappings. The supposed impetus for Christ’s test of the faithful is the fact that his parents were denied any shelter or kindness in the events leading up to his birth. They tried for lodging everywhere, but were turned away, and had to settle for their child, Son of the Living God, being born in a manger, with a bed of straw and animal attendants.
There were enough members of the Church of the Angels of Accord who eventually made the journey to America to create three towns. These were situated in south-western Ohio; the largest one, and the one still in existence, is Threadwell. The other two towns, Bashville and Solantri, both grew old and empty—folks moved off to bigger places like Cleveland and Columbus and Springfield—and then they just rotted and fell apart.
If you can find old books from as late as the 1930s about Christmas in Ohio, the belief in the Visitation might be mentioned. There was one book—Strangers by Esther Grant, from Golden Peacock Press, 1945, a compilation of these types of encounters with secret angels sent to test humanity. The last known or suspected encounter with one of the Angels of Accord was only a couple of years ago. It took place in the farmland on the outskirts of Threadwell.
Ford does a fine job with the back and forth between protagonists: a married couple and their unexpected guest.
While not a gloss on the thing-that-wouldn't-leave, "The Visitation" does have some devastating things to say as a no-good-deed-goes-unpunished story.
* * *
"The Lord of Misrule" by M. Rickert is about a protagonist trying to pay back children, haunted after a fatal eruption of anger in her own childhood.
There are so many ways to be lost, aren’t there? People said I “lost” my sister, even as I stood by her casket. Yet, there she was. I had to look quite hard to see the scar beneath her bangs and the artful application of corpse make up, the small wound above eyes that opened, in my dreams, black as coal.
“Here, I am,” I whispered, peering through the falling snow at the road barely revealed by headlights. “I fell in love. I think. And I’m on the way to meet the kid that might be my stepson. Maybe dreams do come true. For me, at least.”
What possessed me to laugh the way I did? It didn’t sound like joy, more a guffaw or jeer. Like somewhere, deep inside, I didn’t believe myself.
The holiday revel she joins with her lover's extended family and five-year-old-son is not a quaintly Dickensian gathering round the punch bowl. When he tells her his family celebrates “Solstice,” he means it.
* * *
"No Light, No Light" by Gemma Files begins as a thriller about eco-terrorists plotting to produce another "year without a summer" via the Icelandic volcano they are investigating. The subterranean entity they inadvertently uncover, sadly, is not a charming rascal from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
* * *
In crafting stories, John Langan sets himself more stylistic challenges than any writer since Peter Straub. "After Words" is wonderfully concrete, rendered almost entirely through dialogue. It is gloriously energizing. "After Words" has more complexity, more dazzle, and more circumspect elegance than any full-length novel produced this year.
Save it for last. You will not be sorry.
* * *
Every reader will have their favorite story in Christmas And Other Horrors. For me there are at least three that convey in a relaxed and confident style their strong sense of actuality about the world and character motivation. Some contributors are more comfortable than others with distance, understatement, and paradox. These are for me the most rewarding stories: where writers acknowledged today as successful pros demonstrate they still thrive on stylistic challenges they set for themselves.
For me, that is enough of a seasonal gift.
Jay
13 November 2023
The Stand (1978) and Swan Song (1987), it will be recalled, could not dispense with the supernatural, either. Sharper and more unforgiving, Earth Abides (1949), I Am Legend (1954), and A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) had no truck with it.
It’s a real shame about the generated voice delivering the notes. The content was appealing but I , personally, couldn’t tolerate the AI voice after a minute or so. Maybe soon we’ll get a ‘real’ person ? Maybe I’m too spoilt from listening to Jasper Lastrange and Tony Walker