Monday, December 2, 2019

Haunting Holiday Books to Read for Christmas


The longer days and cold nights are perfectly suited for reading spooky stories. It recalls past traditions from Victorian and Edwardian times when friends and family would gather on Christmas Eve and spend the night by the crackling fire telling each other spooky stories. Let's keep this wonderful tradition alive this holiday season with the following collections of holiday-themed horrors that you can read this Creepmas!

These books of short Christmas ghost stories would make a perfect gift, either to yourself or your favorite horror reader. It would also be fun to take these home for the holidays to read them to your friends and family as you spend time together - which will infuse your gatherings with some must-needed spookiness this time of year!

Check out these Haunting Holiday Books to Read for Christmas:


Spirits of the Season: Christmas Hauntings - Festive cheer turns to maddening fear in this new collection of seasonal hauntings, presenting the best Christmas ghost stories from the 1850s to the 1960s. The traditional trappings of the holiday are turned upside down as restless spirits disrupt the merry games of the living, Christmas trees teem with spiteful pagan presences, and the Devil himself treads the boards at the village pantomime. As the cold night of winter closes in and the glow of the hearth begins to flicker and fade, the uninvited visitors gather in the dark in this distinctive assortment of haunting tales.


Haunted Christmas: Yuletide Ghosts And Other Spooky Holiday HappeningsIn plenty of time for the holidays, here is a gathering of thirty tales of ghosts, hauntings, and other paranormal happenings purported to have taken place on or around Christmas, or that are otherwise related to this holiday. By a long-time believer in the paranormal who in the introduction tells the story of her own Christmas ghost, Haunted Christmas.



Christmas Ghost Stories: A Collection of Winter Tales - No Christmas stocking will be complete without the "scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago" promised by this tantalizing collection of dark, fantastical and romantic "winter tales" from the pen of horror writer Mark Onspaugh. Sometimes funny, sometimes scary and occasionally bittersweet, this collection of Christmas Ghost Stories is perfect fare for sharing aloud by the fire or cuddling with someone (or something!) toasty on a moonless December night. 


Classic Ghost Stories: Spooky Tales to Read at Christmas - The great writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, from Elizabeth Gaskell to Rudyard Kipling, also produced some of the most influential ghost stories ever written, shaping the conventions of the form for generations of writers to follow. Collected here are some of the most iconic of these Victorian ghost stories, from Charles Dickens' "The Signalman" to M.R. James' "A Warning to the Curious", alongside more unexpected contributions from masters of the form such as J.S. Le Fanu and Algernon Blackwood.



Ghosts of Christmas Past: A Chilling Collection of Modern and Classic Christmas Ghost Stories - 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.


The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories - 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. The first-ever collection of Victorian Christmas ghost stories, culled from rare 19th-century periodicals.


The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories Volume Two - Following the popularity of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), Victorian newspapers and magazines frequently featured ghost stories at Christmas time, and reading them by candlelight or the fireside became an annual tradition. This second volume of Victorian Christmas ghost stories contains fifteen tales, most of which have never been reprinted. They represent a mix of the diverse styles and themes common to Victorian ghost fiction and include works by once-popular authors like Grant Allen and Eliza Lynn Linton as well as contributions from anonymous or wholly forgotten writers. This volume also features a new introduction by Prof. Allen Grove.


The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories, Volume Three - Seeking to capitalize on the success of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843), Victorian newspapers and magazines frequently featured ghost stories at Christmas time, and reading them by candlelight or the fireside became an annual tradition, a tradition Valancourt Books is pleased to continue with our series of Victorian Christmas ghost stories. This third volume contains twenty tales, most of them never before reprinted. They represent a mix of the diverse styles and themes common to Victorian ghost fiction and include works by once-popular authors like Ellen Wood and Charlotte Riddell as well as contributions from anonymous or wholly forgotten writers. This volume also features a new introduction by Prof. Simon Stern.



Fireside Ghost Stories for Christmas Eve: An Anthology of Winter Horror Tales - Enclosed in this volume are tales of dark winter nights and harrowing encounters between the worlds of Man and the Hereafter. There are tales of cursed antiquities, otherworldly toy stores, possessed dolls, deals with the devil, and murderous cabin fever. I hope your Christmas is – as M. R. James put it “may be the cheerfuller for a story-book” which takes you back to a different world

Stay spooky!

Note: Some items in this post may contain affiliate links. By using these affiliate links, you are supporting The Spooky Vegan and keeping this website running, so many spooky thanks to you!

3 comments:

  1. O Horrid Night is a good collection too (https://amzn.to/2qfJkvA). I take any chance to promote FunDead Publications :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. What an awesome collection of suggestions! My Amazon wish list just got a load of new additions. Thank you!

    ReplyDelete
  3. The Valancourt books and the Ghosts of Christmas Past have been on my Creepmas To Do list for too long, it’s time I fixed that. All those others look good too.

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...