THE TWELVE STRANGE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS / AUTHOR: SYD MOORE / PUBLISHER: ONEWORLD PUBLICATIONS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
We’re already big fans of Syd Moore’s excellent Essex Witch Museum mysteries, so a new addition to the series is always something to celebrate. In the case of this short story collection, it’s also an early Christmas present, even if Rosie Strange and Sam Stone – the series’ regular protagonists – are kept mostly in the background. Instead, we’re spending time with some of the series’ more peripheral characters and quickly find out that it’s not just Rosie and Sam who’ve had spectacular run-ins with the macabre and the uncanny.
The stand-out is a tale set in Cornwall that plays like a slow-burn folk horror with heavy nods towards Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn and John Carpenter’s The Fog. The fact that it also highlights one of the Witch Museum’s more intriguing secondary characters will also give hardcore fans a welcome shudder.
Besides that entry, the better and most effective stories in this collection are the ones that creep up on you slowly like a cold mist and don’t push hard towards a big reveal: a cop who discovers it’s impossible to outwit death, even when she gets a spectral heads-up whenever death is on its way; a clever story about the consequences of not checking with the neighbours after an old lady dies, leaving social workers to deal with her multitude of cats; the reminiscence of a visit to an Icelandic shaman and an unearthly intervention that unmasks a World War II spy and reveals some unwelcome prophecies ; a desperate woman on a heartbreaking quest for her missing children, not understanding why she’s unable to communicate with the only person she meets. Rosie and Sam’s Scooby Doo-ish encounter with the spectre of Spring-heeled Jack is also a lot of fun.
But, as is the nature of these kinds of stories, a handful of them also suffer from a small case of ‘Vault of Horror-itis’ , feeling like the sort of enjoyable but predictable twist-in-the-tale stories Amicus would have used in their movie anthology heyday (especially the ones about a monstrous twin, a grisly pursuit for the perfect pair of legs, and a downtrodden husband harangued by his mother-in-law-possessed Hoover.) They’re still worth reading though, as is the evocatively written story about an evening in Spain that begins with a suicide and ends with the horrific reappearance of a legendary monster. In fact, it’s only the final story – about a tight-wad publican enduring her own version of A Christmas Carol – that misses the mark, and that’s only because it follows the original classic’s rhythms too closely.
All in all, this is another terrific entry in the rapidly growing Essex Witch Museum collection and if Santa left this in our stocking at Christmas we’d be very happy – but who wants to wait until Christmas when it’s in stores in time for Halloween?
