The Dead of Winter (2023) edited by Cecily Gayford

Some varieties of spectral Yuletide fiction

Readers unfamiliar with The Dead of Winter may prefer to read these notes only after preading the collection.

The Dead of Winter (2023) edited by Cecily Gayford will find appreciative readers among new and old enthusiasts for horror fiction. Contents of the anthology combine acknowledged classics with a newer work. The volume is of manageable length: no risk of broken noses for those who still enjoy reading a book in bed. 

"A Pair of Muddy Shoes" by Lennox Robinson is a nicely hallucinatory story. It depicts specters as capable of possessing the living so as to exact their revenges. The plight of the young heroine-narrator, hoping for a Christmas invitation from an aunt to stave-off hardship, is poignantly done.

"Smee" by A. M. Burrage is a holiday horror masterpiece. Burrage uses his skill at brevity to sharply render a series of meetings between revelers at a house party.  The menacing atmosphere thickens with each scene. 

"A Bad Heart" by Ruth Rendell is a more contemporary non-supernatural horror story, and a well-relished conte cruel. Mr. Duncan is invited to dinner at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Crouch; he dreads the event since he recently fired Hugo Crouch. Table talk turns on a recent Macbeth performance. When car trouble strands Duncan overnight at the Crouch home, he suspects these latter day Macbeths have prepared a blood-letting. 

E. F. Benson excelled at vacation horror stories. Narrators found trouble when visiting friends, interacting with fellow hotel guests, or joining big house parties. "The Gardener" is typical: the narrator joins married friends at their December rental. Peripheral sightings, unexplained lights in an unoccupied cottage, and breaching planchette messages hint at quickly brewing havoc.

"The Case of Lady Sannox" by Arthur Conan Doyle is a gruesome comedy of marital revenge. Beware the husband who seems oblivious to your affair with his wife. Also: check for fake beards when strangers offer a deal too good to be true.

"Lucky’s Grove" by peerless H. Russell Wakefield details the countdown to a large-scale family Christmas party. Mr. Braxton, a nouveau riche department store magnate, has just purchased Abingdale Hall, where his father slaved his life away as a servant.

  As a footman was helping them to sole meunière Mr Braxton said, ‘Curtis has found a very fine Christmas tree. It’s in the barn. You must come and look at it after lunch.’

  ‘That is good,’ replied his wife. ‘Where did he get it from?’

  Mr Braxton hesitated for a moment.

  ‘From Lucky’s Grove.’

  Mrs Braxton looked up sharply.

  ‘From the grove!’ she said, surprised.

  ‘Yes, of course he didn’t realise – anyway it’ll be all right, it’s all rather ridiculous, and it’ll be replanted before the New Year.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ agreed Mrs Braxton. ‘After all it’s only a clump of trees.’

With a similarly acute genius for brevity and pace as A. M. Burrage, Wakefield gives us half a dozen short scenes of thickening inevitability: strange sightings, uncanny impressions, spreading illnesses, before the climax. 

"The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance" by M. R. James teeters on the verge of storytelling's dissolution. Its apparent aporias leave us flat-footed. But at the end, when weird events finally explode and reveal the solution to the story's mystery, the senseless sense of the whole thing is chilling. 

"The Book" by Margaret Irwin does its job beautifully. A family's doom is sealed by the simplest thing: a father's selection of a book to read one sleepless night from the dining room bookshelf. The father quickly enters into macabre intercourse with the book, which seems bent on finishing itself as tragedy. It seduces Mr. Corbett with easy wealth and tempting sins. 

....Reading was the best thing to calm the nerves, and Dickens a pleasant, wholesome and robust author.

Tonight, however, Dickens struck him in a different light. Beneath the author’s sentimental pity for the weak and helpless, he could discern a revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering, while the grotesque figures of the people in Cruikshank’s illustrations revealed too clearly the hideous distortions of their souls. What had seemed humorous now appeared diabolic.…

"The Kit-Bag" by Algernon Blackwood cautions us about relying on borrowed luggage. Because a bag is empty does not mean it is unaccompanied.

  The kit-bag by this time was two-thirds full, and stood upright on its own base like a sack of flour. For the first time he noticed that it was old and dirty, the canvas faded and worn, and that it had obviously been subjected to rather rough treatment. It was not a very nice bag to have sent him – certainly not a new one, or one that his chief valued. He gave the matter a passing thought, and went on with his packing. Once or twice, however, he caught himself wondering who it could have been wandering down below, for Mrs Monks had not come up with letters, and the floor was empty and unfurnished. From time to time, moreover, he was almost certain he heard a soft tread of The kit-bag by this time was two-thirds full, and stood upright on its own base like a sack of flour. For the first time he noticed that it was old and dirty, the canvas faded and worn, and that it had obviously been subjected to rather rough treatment. It was not a very nice bag to have sent him – certainly not a new one, or one that his chief valued. He gave the matter a passing thought, and went on with his packing. Once or twice, however, he caught himself wondering who it could have been wandering down below, for Mrs Monks had not come up with letters, and the floor was empty and unfurnished. From time to time, moreover, he was almost certain he heard a soft tread of someone padding about over the bare boards – cautiously, stealthily, as silently as possible – and, further, that the sounds had been lately coming distinctly nearer.

Blackwood is seldom praised for concision. "The Kit-Bag," with its professional milieu and claustrophobic urban setting, seems like the work of a different writer, not the author of "The Wendigo" and "The Willows."

"Jerry Bundler" by W. W. Jacobs may be filed under: ‘It’s not a subject for jesting.’ While not pulsing with Saki's bite, "Jerry Bundler" does surpass the same author's blackhearted gem, "The Well." 

Jay

19 December 2023