This year, Christmas belongs to the dead. Shadow House Publishing gives you tidings of terror with YULETIDE VICTORIAN GHOST STORIES FOR CHRISTMAS. The Winter Solstice. Yule. Christmas. The Holiday season has always hid horror beneath the holly and shadows behind the merriment. Long before Christianity, Christmas Eve was a night of Pagan mystery, when humanity prayed for the sun’s return, and spirits wandered snowy midnight lanes. The Victorians popularized the tradition of telling ghost stories at this festive time of year, savoring tales of specters and otherworldly beings amidst the warmth of Holiday joy. Editor William P. Simmons invites readers to continue this shivery tradition with a collection of the genre’s most terrifying Christmas stories. See why the Holiday season is the most frightening time of the year with 20 rare and classic supernatural stories collected from various sources, featuring a diverse array of authors, some well-known, others unjustly forgotten. This is the dark gift you’ve been waiting for—a fearful feast of Yule stories that merge the Christmas traditions of years past with timeless nightmares…and visitations that could happen to you. Bone-chilling classics from Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, J.S. Le Fanu, and M.R. James appear alongside rare terror tales from forgotten authors who make their first appearance here in decades, including James Hain Friswell, F. Frankfurt Moore, Ernest R. Suffling, Dick Donovan, Bernard Capes, and Grant Allen. Christmas wouldn’t be complete without a visit from the genre’s Macabre Mistresses. Mary E. Braddon, Charlotte Riddell, Elizabeth Gaskill, and Louisa Baldwin fill your stockings with tales of dread and dismay for the merriest time of the year. Spend this Christmas with graveyard visitants and fearsome night creatures from legend and lore. Celebrate with a spectral spectacle of goblins and sprites, family curses and pagan sacrifices, doomed houses and haunted minds. Wraiths, psychopomps, demons, and the Devil himself appear to share a cup of cheer…and make you look uneasily into the shadows. Yuletide Frights About the William P. Simmons is a supernatural fiction author, critic, & journalist. Eight of his stories earned Honorable Mentions in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. By Reason of Darkness was praised by Publisher’s Weekly, All Hallows & Cemetery Dance. Graham Masterton, Hugh B. Cave & T.M. Wright have endorsed his fiction, and he has interviewed such authors as Richard Matheson, F. Paul Wilson & Caitlin Kiernan. He is the editor of the anthologies Season of the Dead and Monster Carnival, and of the series Horror Hall of Fame Novellas and Macabre Mistresses. SHADOW HOUSE PUBLISHING preserves our horror heritage with authoritative and affordable special editions of quality supernatural literature.
Author
'Simmons draws from a well with waters dark and deep, that taste of guilt, despair and fear, to cultivate his surprising and inventive tales of horror.' — ADAM NEVILL (British Fantasy Award Winning author of THE RITUAL and NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE). William Simmons is an acclaimed author, critic, anthologist, and journalist specializing in supernatural horror fiction. He is an Active Member of the HWA. Eight of his stories received ‘Honorable Mentions’ in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. His collection WE FEED THE DARK received accolades from such horror legends as ADAM NEVILL, ERIC J. GUINGARD, and FORREST AGUIRRE. “Avoiding horror’s traditional icons and their premeasured fright potential ... (Simmons is) a writer whose approach is both original and refreshingly unconventional.”
- PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY His collection BY REASON OF DARKNESS received rave reviews from Cemetery Dance, All Hallows, and Publisher's Weekly, who called him Simmons “…evokes both Ray Bradbury and Joyce Carol Oates.” – PETER BELL, All Hallows His first collection BECOMING OCTOBER sold out quickly upon release, and he collaborated on the Halloween collection DARK HARVEST with author Paul Melznick. His stories have appeared in several venues, including Cemetery Dance, Flesh & Blood, Darkness Rising (1-9), Infinity Plus, Dark Discoveries, and many more. His poetry has appeared in Chizine, Gothic.net, Lullaby Hearse, Dead Cat Bouncing, etc. GRAHAM MASTERTON, author of The Minatou, said Simmons “has the gift of making an ordinary day seem scary.” NANCY KILPATRICK, author of The Goth Bible, said “Simmons has a knack for constructing dark, creepy, introverted tales, full of obscure terrors that reflect nearly mythical realms.” And T.M. WRIGHT, author of Strange Seed, compared Simmons’ horror fiction to “like being taken back forty years and discovering Poe for the first time, and M.R. James, and Shirley Jackson.” Simmons has contributed reviews, essays, and scholarship to Rue Morgue, Publisher’s Weekly, Wormwood, Hellnotes, Gauntlet, Cemetery Dance, and others. His review columns include “Dark Devotions”, “Literary Lesions”, and “Folk Fears”. He contributed an introduction to Falling into Heaven, by Maynard & Sims, and his reviews have been blurbed for several books. As a journalist, he created Our Ladies of Darkness, one of the earlier interview columns devoted to female genre authors, and Beyond the Fifth Dimension: The Twilight Zone Interviews, which spoke with surviving scribes of the influential television series. He also conducted two special chapbook length interviews with Richard Matheson and F. Paul Wilson, both for Gauntlet Press. His reviews have been used as blurbs by Tartan Asian Extreme and he has contributed Liner Notes to DVD releases. “His anthologies are carefully crafted, the stories bleeding into each other with seamless precision.” – MAYNARD & SIMS, Demon Eyes. As an anthologist he has edited the bestselling SEASON OF THE DEAD: SUPERNATURAL HORROR FOR HALLOWEEN (reviewed by Rue Morgue) and the bestselling WILDWOOD: TALES OF TERROR & TRANSFORMATION FROM THE FOREST. His other anthologies are MONSTER CARNIVAL and YULETIDE FRIGHTS. He is the series editor for Shadow House Publishing has several anthologies and single author collections in development. for Shadow House Publishing, including The Library of Weird Fiction and Horror Hall of Fame Novellas.
