Haunted Holidays: Part 2

When the holiday season rolls around, many of us find comfort in festive traditions and cozy gatherings. But for those who prefer their holidays with a side of spine-tingling chills, there’s nothing better than curling up with a good horror story. In this edition of Haunted Holidays, we’re diving into three intriguing collections of eerie tales, from forgotten classics of the Golden Age to the dark musings of modern masters like Stephen King. Whether you’re in the mood for spectral telephone calls, cursed sculptures, or unsettling questions about destiny, these books offer a little something for every horror enthusiast. Let’s explore the frights that await.

Ghosts from the Library 

First up is “Ghosts from the Library”. The from the library series collects classic and neglected crime stories from a variety of authors of the  19th and early 20th centuries, which it describes as the golden age of crime fiction. This volume stands out as focusing on horror stories written by writers primarily known for their crime fiction. To put it kindly, most of these stories aren’t very good. It’s probably for the best that most of these writers only occasionally dabbled in the genre. The standout from this collection is “Personal Call” by Agatha Christie, a script of a radio drama about a series of ghostly telephone calls. Otherwise, this book is very skippable.

The Living Stone

Next up is another group of stories from the same era. The “Living Stone,” edited by Henry Bartholomew, presents a collection of weird fiction centering on sculpture as a theme. You would think this is a very niche subject to devote an entire anthology to, but the collection here, with stories by well-known authors such as HP Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, and Edith Wharton, as well as lesser-known, at least to me, writers such as Oliver Onions and James Causey, offers up a surprising variety of stories whose only similarity is they feature stonework of some kind. 

In some, beautiful statuary inspires obsessive devotion, others are imbued with secret curses, in another, an ancient monolith literally and somewhat comically stumbles after its victims, crushing them.      

The Mask

My favorite story here is “The Mask“ by Robert Chambers, taken from his most famous work “The King in Yellow” best known for the inspiration it gave to the HBO series True Detective. The mask tells the story of a sculptor’s secret chemical process by which he can instantly transform any living tissue into stone, and the predictable tragedies which ensue for those around him. 

Other highlights are “The Man of Stone” by Hazel Heald and HP Lovecraft, about a jealous husband/wizard’s scheme to destroy his wife and a visiting sculptor, and “Bagnell Terrace” by Ef Benson, which transports a haunted Egyptian artifact to a sleepy English suburb, ending with a very well done haunting scene.

You Like It Darker

Our final book is the most recent collection of Stephen King’s shorter fiction: “You Like It Darker.” I’ve always preferred King’s short stories and novellas more than his novels. 11/22/63 is a good example of why. Without the constraint of limited pages, that book began strongly but lost steam midway through, tediously treading water for a couple hundred pages before things got good again. 

For a more direct comparison, “Jerusalem’s Lot”, a kind of prequel to Salem’s Lot, is a much superior work. Likewise here the story “Rattlesnakes,” a sequel to Cujo, for me works much better than the original book. 

Rattlesnakes takes an interesting premise: what if ghosts aged like people do? And builds an effectively creepy story around it. Given that virtually everything King writes becomes a movie or streaming series, I look forward to seeing the grotesque antagonists of “Rattlesnakes” on the Big Screen.

The Answer Man 

Another highlight of this collection is called “The 

Answer Man” which the king in the afterward reveals is the completion of a fragment of a story he began several decades ago. The “Answer Man” follows the life of a young man just starting out in the world,  who encounters a mysterious answer man, who promises to correctly answer any specific question of fact about the future he can think to ask in a limited time. 

The “Answer Man” reappears throughout the protagonist’s life during times of extreme doubt about his life choices. This story asks questions about fate, destiny, and exactly how useful or reassuring would a knowledge of the future be, if it comes without the ability to change it. Sometimes quite a lot, more often not at all.

Dreamers and Bad Dreams

Like any collection, the quality of the stories here varies. “Dreamers,” about an assistant to a mad scientist whose attempts to unlock the secrets of the universe through dream hypnosis go horribly wrong, is a lot of fun. 

Bad Dream

Danny Coughlin’s “Bad Dream,” about a man whose premonition leads him to discover a dead body and become the police’s prime suspect in the murder, is much less effective. By far the longest story in this collection, it could use some trimming. The same basic Conversations and interrogations recur over and over again, as the police and his neighbors doubt Danny’s  Sudden psychic ability until the plot basically resolves itself off the page.

Final Thoughts 

As a whole though this is an excellent collection of horror and science fiction stories. Now an old man, many of King’s narrators here are old men themselves, looking back at their lives and wondering whether they’ve made good use of their time in this world. King himself at least I think has.