There’s nothing finer than settling down at Christmas time to read a creepy tale or several. So pour a glass of your favourite tipple, stoke up the fire and indulge in these spooky seasonal tales. Enjoy
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Thank you Lynn for sharing my blog and my new e book. 🙂
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My pleasure Alyson
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I never thought about Christmas as a time to read scary stories, but I’d forgotten about Krampus! And come to think of it, visiting with some of my relatives *does* remind me of certain horror stories… 😉
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And I’ve here we have a bit of a tradition of ghost stories at Christmas – there was Dickens of course, who wrote several seasonal ghost stories, not just Christmas carol and MR James who was an Edwardian academic and writer of ghost stories. Something about the long nights and people gathered together I guess. As you say, all that family under one roof!
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I have heard of that tradition, now that you mention it — perhaps I heard it from you one of these previous Christmas seasons! And yes of course, I forgot about Dickens.
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Probably us weird Northern Europeans, looking for extra darkness through the long winter months 🙂
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We had plenty of winter darkness in Michigan, but our general approach seemed to be : It’s freezing and gray and terrible so ACT HAPPY. NO, THAT’S NOT JOLLY ENOUGH. BE @#$#@ JOLLIER, YOU @#$#@$#!
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Haha! The Brits aren’t very good at acting happy. Or being positive. We do like to moan, not least about the weather! We don’t really understand people being too cheerful. Grimly determined – we can do that. Sorry if I’ve said this to you before, but I saw a TV show once that quoted the different endings for the stories Frosty the Snowman and the British writer Raymond Brigg’s The Snowman as illustrating the difference in mentality between Americans and the Brits. Frosty melts, but he’ll be back when the snow returns next winter. Brigg’s Snowman has a magical adventure with a young boy, takes him flying through the winter sky, to see the Northern Lights, the best Christmas ever. He melts … and leaves the young boy crying in the snow! That sums us up 🙂 🙂
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I’m not familiar with the Briggs’ story, but based on your description, that’s a great example, I agree!
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This is my neck of the woods, or used to be. Yorkshire in winter brrrrr.
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I know. I wouldn’t want to go back to Derbyshire in the winter now I’m used to Somerset
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Some people find that grey light, heavy cloud and black stone picturesque. I just find it very grim and very cold.
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Well, it is picturesque if you;re looking at a photo or just visiting. If you have to sit underneath it for six months … not so much
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It’s pretty bleak for most of the year, the Pennines anyway, not enough trees and too much black stone…
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Ah, yes, the black stone. I remember it from my childhood – all the sandstone and limestone blackened by the fires of the Industrial Revolution, the buildings wearing all that hard work and suffering in their skins
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Good way of putting it. I’m writing a Yorkshire mill story at the moment, sort of Gothic mystery and I’m really enjoying it.
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Live a Gothic tale. Have just tested an opening for my new novel. Bit creepy, promising. Looking forward to getting stuck in
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Contemporary?
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Set in three 1970s, during the three day week, so lots of power cuts and fuel shortages
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Ooh I remember that, sort of. Up on the Pennines, no lights except the stars. I saw a ball of gas once, pink. And UFOs almost every night 🙂
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Wow. I wonder what they were, your balls of gas? And I wonder if we’d all see things like that more if we had more power cuts. I can’t quite remember the three day week, though I remember the winter of discontent a few years later in 1978. We kids just enjoyed the power cuts, all the candles. I remembered a lot of rubbish liked up in the streets though
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We didn’t have a street, it was countryside, so I wouldn’t have remembered the rubbish.
I do remember that pink sphere though that floated parallel with the lane and then just disappeared. I did read somewhere that it must have been some kind of gas phenomenon, like ball lightning (except there wasn’t a storm). I’ve tried finding out more with no success. Weird.
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That’s fantastic. Live three sound of that. I remember years ago when we lived in Hull, the clouds were full of rainbows, like an oil slick, held in three clouds, but with sort of jagged lines passing through it. Apparently it was a rare but perfectly explainable phenomenon, something to do with ice crystals in the clouds. But it was odd, unsettling actually. Never seen anything like it before or since and never found a photo of it either. Nature is peculiar sometimes
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That sounds like an aurora borealis type of phenomenon! Yes, some of these things are inexplicable and you only find a trace of them in the stuff posted by ufo/aliens cranks.
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It did look rather like an aurora, you’re right. The closest image I can find is this, though I remember the colours being stronger https://www.weathernationtv.com/news/photos-rare-rainbow-clouds-spotted-europe/
As for aliens, I’m sure there are many, though they may well be microbial or so far away we’ll never meet them
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What gorgeous clouds! It might be the photo hasn’t captured the depth of colour, or simply that your childhood memory has sharpened them.
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Looking forward to reading your take on Gothic too 😀
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I keep going back to the beginning and adding bits. It’s starting to feel like Groundhog Day…
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Ha! Just as long as you’re happy with the bits, you’re adding layers. Sounds intriguing
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It’s a story that started off as a 400 word piece of flash fiction. I liked the idea so took the 400 words and worked out from there. I’m at 25,000 words now and back at page 11 again. It might actually reach novel length by the time the toing and froing is over.
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It has to be the length it has to be, though. And your experienced enough to know when to stop – no passing in a Jane Dougherty tale!
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It might well end up being a story just for me. You know what it’s like, the story might be fantastic but if it’s too long/short nobody will even read past the query letter.
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At least you’ll enjoy writing it. It serialised a picaresque Gothic vampire serial on the blog a couple of years ago – took the best part of a year and only a handful of people regularly read it. I’ll never get it published, it’s too melodramatic, too out of kilter. But I thoroughly enjoyed writing it and perhaps that’s enough
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I admire you ploughing on with it. The problem I can see with that (unless you’re getting enough pleasure out of writing it) is that only your regular readers will follow it. It’s hard to jump into a serial if you haven’t been there from the beginning. Also publication on a blog counts as publication so you’re a bit stymied for publishing it elsewhere anyway.
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All true. Though I enjoyed the process of writing a serial and being a history nerd, I enjoyed how I was limping in the footsteps of Dickens, making up and writing a story week by week. Gave me a tiny insight into how he wrote some of his novels.
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I can see that. It’s something I’ve never tried, as once it’s out there you can’t go back and slip in an extra scene or decide not to kill one of the characters after all. I like the plot to go back and fill in the blanks.
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Well, that’s the sensible way to write a lung piece! I came to see why some of Dickens novels that were originally serialised have been criticised for being uneven or having wandering plots, a lack of narrative logic or flow. Very easy to do when you’re writing a story bit by bit over a year!
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It takes a form of genius to make the story come out sensibly at all.
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Very true. Though I would never say Dickens was faultless – certainly as a human being he had some major flaws- he did own some darn good tales
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No, he probably wasn’t the kind of person you’d want as a house guest for very long, but what he was isn’t what he did.
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Very true. He did a lot of good, what ever he got up to in his private life
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Not for us to judge.
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Yes, I probably made a mistake by reading Clare Tomalin’s biography of him. Doesn’t show him in the best light
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