Christmas and Other Horrors: An Anthology of Solstice Horror - Hardcover

 
9781803363264: Christmas and Other Horrors: An Anthology of Solstice Horror
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1803363266 ISBN 13: 9781803363264
Verlag: Titan Books, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Hugo Award winning editor, and horror legend, Ellen Datlow presents a terrifying and chilling horror anthology of original short stories exploring the endless terrors of winter solstice traditions across the globe, featuring chillers by Tananarive Due, Stephen Graham Jones, Alma Katsu and many more.

Even though many celebrate the winter solstice as a time of joy, a darker tradition of ghost tales and horror stories resides in the long winter nights. This anthology of all new stories will scour the world for the unholy, the dark, the dangerous, the horrific aspects of a time when families and friends come together—for better and worse. 

Alongside Christmas celebrations, around the world are Makara Sankranti in the Hindu calendar in India, Yalda Night in Iran, Chanukah, the Roman Saturnalia, the Krampus, Dongzhi (solar term) in East Asia where sunlight passes through the 17 arches of Seventeen Arch Bridge, Summer Palace, Beijing, the pagan festival of Yule, St. Lucia’s Day in Scandinavia, the Druidic tradition of Alban Arthan, Soyal for Hopi Indians, Peruvian solstice festivals, and even Christmas in Antarctica at the research stations.

Because the weather outside is frightful, but the fire inside is hungry…

Featuring stories from Tananarive Due, Terry Dowling, Glen Hirshberg, Stephen Graham Jones,Alma Katsu, Nick Mamatas, Benjamin Percy, M. Rickert, Kaaron Warren, and more.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for forty years as fiction editor of OMNI Magazine and SCIFICTION. She currently acquires short stories and novellas for Tor.com. In addition, she has edited about one hundred science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies, including the annual The Best Horror of the Year series, The Doll Collection, Mad Hatters and March Hares, Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, and Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles.

       She's won multiple World Fantasy Awards, Locus Awards, Hugo Awards, Bram Stoker Awards, International Horror Guild Awards, Shirley Jackson Awards. Datlow was recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention for "outstanding contribution to the genre," was honored with the Life Achievement Award by the Horror Writers Association, in acknowledgment of superior achievement over an entire career, and honored with the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award at the 2014 World Fantasy Convention.

            She lives in New York.

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Hugo Award winning editor, and horror legend, Ellen Datlow presents this chilling horror anthology of original short stories exploring the endless terrors of winter solstice traditions across the globe, featuring chillers by Tananarive Due, Stephen Graham Jones, Alma Katsu and many more.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

THE IMPORTANCE OF A TIDY HOME

Christopher Golden

IF anyone had told Freddy he would one day be elbow deep in a garbage bin behind a third-rate restaurant in Salzburg, searching for a late dinner, he would have scoffed at them. Haughtily, of course, the way professors are meant to scoff. That had been his occupation—both vocation and avocation—until 1957, when addiction to morphine had led first to petty crimes and then to a psychiatric hospital. This was before Austria had begun to approach drug addiction as a problem requiring treatment instead of punishment, and so there had been a bit of time in prison as well.
Prison had helped.
Freddy knew that wasn’t the case for many who had been in his position, but for him, prison had been a time of clarity. Without drugs, without alcohol, without distraction. He had learned that the mania he had always experienced, the way his skull felt like a hive of agitated bees, could be survived. And if that meant he sometimes saw things that weren’t there, or said things that others interpreted as either a bit mad or wildly inappropriate, well, that was the eccentricity of a professor.
Of course, once he had been released, no one wanted him as a professor anymore. Or anything else, for that matter.
By that night, the fifth of January, 1973, he had been living without a home for nine years, during which time he had never diluted his brain with a single ounce of alcohol, nor the use of any illegal substance. But since the polite society of his city had finished with him, Freddy had finished with it. He lived in its parks and haunted its alleys, he accepted the offerings of strangers but never met their eyes, he forged a life from their castoffs, from food and clothing discarded and forgotten just as he had been.
The first time he saw the Schnabelperchten walking the streets in their black robes, with their gleaming shears and their enormous, bone-like beaks protruding from beneath their hoods, it did not surprise him that they passed him by. Their duties could not bring them to his doorstep, because of course he had none. No threshold, no door, no visitors, nowhere to mark the start of a new year, only the continued existence of life invisible, a creature unseen. Quiet, even when loud.
The Schnabelperchten were even quieter.
Tonight, he and his friend Bern were out together in search of food. Freddy had forgotten the date until he spotted the creatures. It was the fourth January fifth he had seen them, and each time they had ignored him. He presumed they appeared every year and that he had slept through their arrival in the years he had missed them.
He watched as they crept along the streets, leaving no trace of their passage through the lightly falling snow. They were delicate creatures, some with their brooms and others with shears, and no door was ever locked to them. Every home opened, no matter how tightly it had been shut up for the evening.
“Chi chi chi,” they whispered in the hush of falling snow, and they went about their business.
Freddy climbed down from the side of the garbage bin, holding the bag of leftovers he had known he would find there. The kitchen staff always wrapped the food being discarded and placed it in a single bag along with the uneaten bread. The restaurant manager frowned upon this practice and had shouted at his employees for encouraging nightly visits from the homeless, but they were kind and waited until he was out of the kitchen before putting out the bag. This place was no Gablerbräu, but the staff there had never been so kind, and even if they had been, Freddy did not like roving around that part of the city late at night. It felt more empty, more open, as if anything could happen. Here, there were more homes, lived in by people who desired quiet evenings, away from the downtown.
A clang of metal echoed along the alley.
Bern had let the garbage bin’s cover come crashing down. Freddy glanced anxiously around, afraid they would draw unwanted attention. If they created any nuisance, their lives would become more difficult. Sometimes he grew frustrated with Bern for his clumsiness, though never for his addiction. Alcoholism made Bern a fool, but it was the engine that drove him, as much a part of him as his left leg.
“Hush,” Freddy said in German, more a plea than an admonition. “Don’t be a fool.”
Bern did not so much as look at him. Thin and gray, unshaven and unkempt, in an ill-fitting suit that did nothing to disguise the state of his dissolution, he staggered from beside the bin to stand next to Freddy.
“Don’t you see them?” he whispered.
Freddy glanced from the alley into the street again. The Schnabelperchten were still passing by, spread out like a hunting party, perhaps twenty feet separating each from the next, some on one side of the street and some on the other. The most fascinating thing about them was the size of those beaks, at least eighteen inches in length, but wide enough that if one could draw back their hoods, the creatures would not have any face at all—or so it seemed. Only beak, the gray-white of bone. The first time he had seen them, nine years ago, Freddy had been reminded of old photos of plague doctors, but these were not masks, nor did they have anything like goggles to resemble eyes.
They glided along the road. Even as he looked, he saw one approach a door that led to a stairwell, rising to the apartment above the flower shop across the street. Silently, Freddy hoped the owners of that shop kept a tidy home.
“Freddy,” Bern rasped, shaking him by the shoulder. “Don’t you see them?”
“Hush. Of course I see them.”
“Are they ghosts?” Bern whispered. “They don’t look like ghosts— they seem solid enough. Are they demons?”
Freddy pondered that. “Honestly, I’m not really sure what they are, though they are certainly not people. They are Schnabelperchten.”
The word caused Bern to screw up his face in a way that made him look like a toddler given an unfamiliar vegetable for the first time.
“I don’t understand. You’ve just said they’re not people, not human. Aren’t you frightened?”
Acid burned in Freddy’s gut. His laugh was bitter. “Of the
Schnabelperchten? Certainly not. You and I have nothing to fear.” “But what are they?” Bern prodded.
Freddy gazed at him, trying not to let his friend see the flicker of distaste that passed through him. “I forget, sometimes, that you are not from Salzburg—”
“What has that got to do with anything?”
“If you were a child here, you would know the story,” Freddy replied. He patted Bern’s back. “Come with me.”
His friend hesitated, but when Freddy began to walk along the alley, Bern followed. Most of the Schnabelperchten had already passed by, but there were a few stragglers who had gone into the homes along the street and only now emerged. Without eyes, it was difficult to know for certain whether the Schnabelperchten noticed them, but they showed no interest. They might as well have been dust motes in the air or dry leaves that skittered along the road.
“Do they not see us?” Bern asked.
“They are like most of the people in this city. We are invisible to them,” he replied.
One of the Schnabelperchten passed by, and in the light of a streetlamp they could see blood on the blades of its shears, dripping onto the street. When Bern saw that blood, he looked as if he might be sick.
“Come,” Freddy said. “Those two.”
He pointed at a pair of the creatures further up the block. They approached the door of a two-story home. Bern followed...

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Verlag
Titan Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1803363266
ISBN 13 
9781803363264
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Herausgeber
Datlow Ellen
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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ISBN 10:  1803363282 ISBN 13:  9781803363288
Verlag: Titan Publ. Group Ltd., 2024
Softcover