More good stuff to share with everyone, plus news of a third that isn’t out yet. Christmas is the season for ghost stories – it sounds strange on the face of it, if you live in North America. It’s more of a European tradition, telling ghost stories at Christmas. You can see it in that most famous of mass-consumed Christmas storytelling, Dickens’ own A Christmas Carol, but there are a pile of other ghost stories, Christmas-themed or otherwise, that take shape in the season. It makes sense, to me. The contrast between the rapid daily darkness of December and the twinkling, merry lights of the holidays can be an eerie one, especially when you’re down and out. It’s a season of miracles and heartbreak.

I read a quiz once, long ago – I mean I was like 9 or 10 – that was meant to measure your risk of a heart attack, or something along those lines. You got a massive penalty to your score if you were reading it during the holiday season, because apparently the stress of this part of the year kills us quicker than anything else. Look at O. Henry’s Gift Of The Magi – poor as hell, a young couple sneaks and scrimps and manages to each secretly come up with the money to buy the other a gift, but in the end their efforts come to naught, and the time and effort is wasted. Cheerful!

So maybe Christmas is a natural time for considering unquiet spirits dragging their chains over our floors, lingering like a bit of undigested mustard, and metaphorically picking our pockets every December the Twenty-Fifth. Maybe by talking about them, trading our impressions of them, we can banish them when the cold darkness really falls down in a month or so. To that end, here are a couple of stories that, if they’re not quite ghost stories, are at the very least kissing cousins. The first, In Between Days, examines the path between what we think is and what might have been; the second, Where Ghosts Walk, lingers on the legacy of unsolved murder in the dim, chaotic past. Click on the images below to get copies of the collections they both appear in.

BLEED ERROR #2

“In Between Days”

Published by Paradox Ghost Press

BLEAK MIDWINTER VOLUME 1: THE DARKEST NIGHT

“Where Ghosts Walk”

Published by Crow & Quill Publishing House

In a final update, another piece, “What You Do For Her”, was accepted for the next issue of The Brazenhead Review. More details on that to come.

Remember to slip a ghost story or two into the season!