Christmas After Dark - 36 Holiday Ghost Stories & Supernatural Thrillers

ByArthur Conan Doyle, M. R. James, saki, Sabine Baring-Gould, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Fergus Hume, John Kendrick Bangs, Jerome K. Jerome, Leonard Kip, Catherine Crowe, Lucie E. Jackson, William Douglas O'Connor, Frank R. Stockton, James Bowker, Grant Allen, Louisa M. Alcott, Florence Marryat, Katherine Rickford, James Matthew Barrie, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, George MacDonald, Bithia Mary Croker, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Catherine L. Pirkis, E. F. Benson & Algernon Blackwood

Release Date: 2017-11-25
Genre: Ghost Stories

Description

Christmas After Dark gathers thirty-six holiday ghost stories and supernatural thrillers in a compelling counterpoint to the season's customary warmth and domestic cheer. Ranging from Gothic hauntings and moral fables to psychological unease, comic macabre, and uncanny adventure, the volume reveals Christmas as a uniquely charged setting for revelations, returns, and disturbances of the familiar. Its most memorable pieces set spectral visitations amid hearths, snowbound houses, ancestral secrets, and festive gatherings, demonstrating the remarkable elasticity of holiday supernatural fiction. The contributors form an expansive nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo-American tradition, bringing together major practitioners of detective fiction, the ghost story, children's fantasy, sensation fiction, realism, and literary Gothic. Their varied careers illuminate the period's fascination with spiritualism, medieval revivalism, domestic anxiety, imperial encounter, and the blurred boundary between rational explanation and supernatural possibility. Across these voices, Christmas becomes both a cultural ritual and a literary threshold, where communal celebration exposes private grief, ethical obligation, social tensions, and buried histories. An excellent choice for readers, students, and scholars of Gothic and seasonal literature, Christmas After Dark offers an unusually rich survey of a durable tradition. The collection invites comparison across styles, national contexts, and narrative strategies, while rewarding readers with suspense, wit, pathos, and imaginative breadth. It is a valuable volume for discovering how many different shadows can gather around the Christmas fire.

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