BLOODY, BLOODY CHRISTMAS – The Greatest Christmas Thrillers & Mysteries

ByArthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, R. Austin Freeman, Fred M. White, Arthur Cheney Train, Edgar Wallace, Wilkie Collins, Robert Barr, O. Henry, Baroness Emma Orczy, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, saki, Sabine Baring-Gould, M. R. James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Fergus Hume, Leonard Kip, Lucie E. Jackson, Catherine Crowe, William Douglas O'Connor, John Kendrick Bangs, Louisa M. Alcott, Frank R. Stockton, Grant Allen, James Bowker, Jerome K. Jerome, Florence Marryat, Katherine Rickford, James Matthew Barrie, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, George MacDonald, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, E. F. Benson & Algernon Blackwood

Release Date: 2019-11-27
Genre: Mysteries & Thrillers

Score: 4

From 8 Ratings

Description

BLOODY, BLOODY CHRISTMAS gathers the festive season's shadow literature: mysteries, thrillers, Gothic visitations, detective puzzles, and ironic seasonal reversals. Against familiar images of hearth, charity, snow, and reunion, these works disclose concealment, danger, crime, and the uncanny. The volume ranges from sensation fiction and supernatural terror to comic misdirection, moral allegory, and the developing logic of detective narrative, making Christmas not merely a setting but a pressure point for social expectation. Its standout pleasures lie in the collision of Yuletide warmth with locked-room suspense, ghostly recurrence, and startling revelations. Its contributors form an unusually rich cross-section of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and American popular literature. Canonical novelists, pioneering women writers, Gothic revivalists, humorists, and architects of modern detective fiction appear together, bringing distinct national, class, religious, and stylistic inflections to seasonal unease. The collection belongs to traditions shaped by Victorian Christmas publishing, the sensation novel, the ghost-story vogue, and the rise of the professional investigator; its varied voices reveal how holiday fiction could entertain while testing domestic ideals and public morality. Recommended for readers of crime fiction, Gothic studies, and Christmas literature alike, this anthology offers an illuminating breadth of forms within one festive, disquieting volume. It invites comparison across eras and modes, rewarding both scholarly inquiry and pleasurable winter reading through the dialogue between mystery, menace, humor, and seasonal ritual.

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