Chill Tidings Dark Tales of the Christmas Season

'The tiles of the hall floor were as pretty as ever, as cold as ever, and bore, as always on Christmas Eve, the trickling pattern of dark blood.'

The gifts are unwrapped, the feast has been consumed and the fire is well fed – but the ghosts are still hungry.

Welcome to the second new collection of dark Christmas stories in the Tales of the Weird series, ushering in a fresh host of nightmarish phantoms and otherworldly intruders bent on joining or ruining the most wonderful time of the year.

Featuring classic tales from Algernon Blackwood, Rosemary Timperley, Sheridan Le Fanu and Elinor Glyn alongside rare pieces from the sleeping periodicals and literary magazines of the Library collection, it’s time to open the door and let the real festivities begin.

Tanya Kirk is Lead Curator of Printed Heritage Collections 1601–1900 at the British Library, and was the co-curator of the major exhibition Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination (2014–15). She edited The Haunted Library: Classic Ghost Stories which was published by the British Library.

1. A Strange Christmas Game - Charlotte Riddell
2. The Old Portrait - Hume Nisbet
3. The Real and the Counterfeit - Louisa Baldwin
4. Old Applejoy’s Ghost - Frank R. Stockton
5. The Fourth Wall - A. M. Burrage
6. Transition - Algernon Blackwood
7. The Festival - H. P. Lovecraft
8. The Crown Derby Plate - Marjorie Bowen
9. Green Holly - Elizabeth Bowen
10. Christmas Re-union - Andrew Caldecott
11. A Christmas Meeting - Rosemary Timperley
12. Someone in the Lift - L. P. Hartley
13. Told After Supper - Jerome K. Jerome