It's Christmas Eve. Snow falls in fierce flurries and a cold biting wind howls around the house. A group of friends tell tales of Christmas, but these tales are to freeze the very marrow in your bones, and to chill the depths of your soul. This is a collection of spooky short stories.
A present contains a monstrous secret. An uninvited guest haunts a Christmas party. A shadow slips across the floor by firelight. A festive entertainment ends in darkness and screams. Who knows what haunts the night at the dark point of the year? This collection of seasonal chillers looks beneath Christmas cheer to a world of ghosts and horrors, mixing terrifying modern fiction with classic stories by masters of the macabre. From Neil Gaiman and M. R. James to Muriel Spark and E. Nesbit, there are stories here to make the hardiest soul quail - so find a comfy chair, lock the door, ignore the cold breath on your neck and get ready to welcome in the real spirits of Christmas.
From malevolent snowmen to Father Christmas - with a difference ... Chris Priestley is on absolute top form in these atmospheric, clever and thoroughly chilling stories. Add a new kind of thrill to the fluffiest of seasons with seven brilliantly conceived examples of why you'd better be good at Christmas time. For stories which can be enjoyed by the whole family, unwrap these perfectly formed festive tales of terror, each with a gripping yarn and genius twist. Singing carols may never seem quite the same again ... especially after dark.
'The tiles of the hall floor were as pretty as ever, as cold as ever, and bore, as always on Christmas Eve, the trickling pattern of dark blood.' The gifts are unwrapped, the feast has been consumed and the fire is well fed - but the ghosts are still hungry. Welcome to the second new collection of dark Christmas stories in the Tales of the Weird series, ushering in a fresh host of nightmarish phantoms and otherworldly intruders bent on joining or ruining the most wonderful time of the year. Featuring classic tales from Algernon Blackwood, Rosemary Timperley, Sheridan Le Fanu and Elinor Glyn alongside rare pieces from the sleeping periodicals and literary magazines of the Library collection, it's time to open the door and let the real festivities begin.
The perfect gift this Christmas season: a generous selection of some of the greatest festive stories of all time This is a collection of the most magical, moving, chilling and surprising Christmas stories from around the world, taking us from frozen Nordic woods to glittering Paris, a New York speakeasy to an English country house, bustling Lagos to midnight mass in Rio, and even outer space. Here are classic tales from writers including Truman Capote, Shirley Jackson, Dylan Thomas, Saki and Chekhov, as well as little-known treasures such as Italo Calvino's wry sideways look at Christmas consumerism, Wolfdietrich Schnurre's story of festive ingenuity in Berlin, Selma Lagerlof's enchanted forest in Sweden, and Irène Nemerovsky's dark family portrait. Featuring santas, ghosts, trolls, unexpected guests, curmudgeons and miracles, here is Christmas as imagined by some of the greatest short story writers of all time.
It's Christmas Eve and a group of friends have gathered around the fireside in a remote cottage. A hushed anticipation falls over the group as, safe inside where surely nothing can harm them, they begin to tell eerie stories of restless spirits eternally condemned to walk the earth.
New Authors and collections. A deluxe edition of original and classic short stories, packed with monsters, vampires and a host of weird creatures. Tales of shadows and voices in the dark from the likes of H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Hope Hodgson are cast with previously unpublished stories by some of the best writers of horror today. New, contemporary and notable writers featured are: DJ Tyrer, Ed Grabianowski, Andrew J. Wilson, Elise Forier Edie, Frank Roger, Gwendolyn Kiste, David A. Elsensohn, Bill Kte'pi, Justin Coates, James Lecky, Eric Esser, John H. Dromey, Kristopher Triana, Michael Bondies, Michael Paul Gonzalez, Glen Damien Campbell, William R.D. Wood, Rebecca J. Allred, and Lucy Taylor. A dazzling collection of the most gripping tales of horror, vividly told.
New Authors and collections. A deluxe edition with a chilling selection of original and classic short stories. The new tales, many of them published here for the first time, are written by today's top authors, and they bring a modern twist to the outstanding mix of intrigue that lurks in the furtive imagination of E.F. Benson, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Washington Irving, Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde, and so many more within this outstanding collection. New, contemporary and notable writers featured are: Philip Brian Hall, Annette Siketa, Cathy Smith, Amanda C. Davis, Donna Cuttress, James Dorr, Lesa Pascavis Smith, Luke Murphy, Jonathan Balog, Michael Penkas, Raymond Little, Rhiannon Rasmussen, Tim Foley, Trevor Boelter, Vonnie Winslow Crist, Brian Rappatta, M. Regan, Zach Chapman, Kurt Bachard, and Jeff Parsons.
The first-ever collection of Victorian Christmas ghost stories, culled from rare 19th-century periodicals During the Victorian era, it became traditional for publishers of newspapers and magazines to print ghost stories during the Christmas season for chilling winter reading by the fireside or candlelight. Now for the first time thirteen of these tales are collected here, including a wide range of stories from a diverse group of authors, some well-known, others anonymous or forgotten. Readers whose only previous experience with Victorian Christmas ghost stories has been Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" will be surprised and delighted at the astonishing variety of ghostly tales in this volume. "In the sickly light I saw it lying on the bed, with its grim head on the pillow. A man? Or a corpse arisen from its unhallowed grave, and awaiting the demon that animated it?" - John Berwick Harwood, "Horror: A True Tale" "Suddenly I aroused with a start and as ghostly a thrill of horror as ever I remember to have felt in my life. Something--what, I knew not--seemed near, something nameless, but unutterably awful." - Ada Buisson, "The Ghost's Summons" "There was no longer any question what she was, or any thought of her being a living being. Upon a face which wore the fixed features of a corpse were imprinted the traces of the vilest and most hideous passions which had animated her while she lived." - Walter Scott, "The Tapestried Chamber"
Rick Scroogeman hates Christmas and he hates being called Scrooge, but everything starts to change when three ghosts visit him, and he realizes this nightmare might be real.