December Tales

Features twelve brand-new eerie tales by award-winning and best-selling authors, as well as eleven chilling classics.(From the Foreword by Colin Dickey)The end of December is different. Dead dark, bleak and without remorse. The wind that had a pleasant briskness to it just a few weeks ago now has a knife’s edge. The sun sits on the edge of the horizon, distant and unmoved, gone almost as quickly as it appears. The skeletal trees have no comfort left to offer us. One doesn’t go outside so much as venture out, bundled up, for necessary provisions before returning to the safety of home. The world has become unforgiving. There is no room for error here. Winter is a time for closing ranks, a time for settling in for the long months. A time when the weather becomes eerie, when the once comforting has become strange. At Halloween the veil between worlds grows thin, but in winter it’s ripped clean open, and in the unrelenting cold we see straight through to the other side. And the other side sees straight into us. It is not a time for revelry. It is a time for ghost stories.Content AlertSome of the stories in this collection include elements of violence, violence against children, suicide, drug use, sex, and profanity. After all, not all ghosts start out as well-heeled consumptive ladies, nor are all those who witness specters prim Victorian antiquarians.Punctuation and SpellingHalf of these stories are new. The other half date from as early as 1834. The authors (or translators) of both the new and classic stories are American, British, and Canadian, and the variations in spellings and punctuation you will encounter in these stories reflect the differing customs of the cultures and of the times. I have chosen to maintain the original spellings and punctuation except in certain bothersome cases in some of the classic tales, such as standardizing “any one” to “anyone” and using double quotes rather than single quotes to designate dialogue.

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