I’ve a tradition around Christmas time each year. I don’t really know when it started; perhaps it was in childhood when I’d often get an anthology as a Christmas gift from an aunt or uncle who knew I was the bookish nephew, but didn’t really know what type of things I read. Maybe it was in adulthood, when the thought of committing – amongst the craziness of pre-Christmas festivities, the mania of the days leading up to the big day itself and the somnambulism of the days following – to a complete novel felt just too much.
But whatever the reason, I love a book of short stories during what our American cousins refer to as “The Holiday Season.”
The good ones (anthologies, not American cousins) give bite-sized nuggets of fictional succour, and have enough variety to ensure that if you’re not loving one, you’ll find something to enjoy in the next.
And Syd Moore’s The Twelve Strange Days of Christmas is one of the very good ones. It’s a creepy gruesome wonderfully funny selection box filled with shocks, surprises, laugh-out-loud gruesomeness*, surreality, and some wonderfully emotional moments.
If it were a seasonal bouquet, it would be a bowl of Roses with all the Roses ripped off and the thorns randomly coated in cyanide, and if it were a seasonal box of chocolates, one third of the ‘toffees’ would be chocolate-coated coughed-up furballs, and most of the soft centres would have had arsenic injected into them.
If it were a seasonal bouquet, it would be a bowl of Roses with all the Roses ripped off and the thorns randomly coated in cyanide, and if it were a seasonal box of chocolates, one third of the ‘toffees’ would be chocolate-coated coughed-up furballs, and most of the soft centres would have had arsenic injected into them.
Either way, you’ll definitely have fun as you gorge yourself, but you’ll also get some wonderfully inventive shocks en route.
Moore is the author of the Essex Witch Museum Mysteries (which – if you love a mashup of the Classic English Cozy and the wyrdness of Le Fanu you should definitely have already checked out), and there are references here to the universe of that series (but you absolutely don’t need to have read the series to revel in these stories). However, the brilliant thing about this anthology is that it shows that there’s so much more to Moore’s talents.
Even if you’re spectacularly averse to Essex, Witches, or Museums in general, there’ll be something in here for you.
There are tales with a twist so sharp they’d have Roald Dahl spinning (in fact, as he’s in his grave, he may already be doing so) and (in ‘Snowy’) a genuinely touching (and twisted) consideration of grief and loss. There’s a touch of Gothic dread in some stories (“The House on Savage Lane,” “In the Bag,”) and of Lovecraftian horror in “She saw Three Ships,” “Madness in A Coruna,” and “Jocelyn’s Story,” and yet there’s a space all the way through for delicate writing, and for real humanity.
These – like the best of Stephen King – are stories about weird things happening to genuinely real people (not, necessarily, genuinely good people), and that makes them more than exercises in the art of the punchline.
It’s a fun, creepy, hugely enjoyable collection and I highly recommend it for yourself or – if you have that bookish relative, but you’re not sure what they read (and you’d really like to scare the shit out of them) – your family.
Enjoy!
(*yes, I LOL at gruesomness. Is that a bad thing?)
You can purchase “The Twelve Strange Days of Christmas” by Syd Moore (Published by Point Blank) here.
And – as always – my Danny Bird Mysteries are available to purchase from Amazon or direct from those lovely people at Fahrenheit Press.
