I’m a Halloween boy, born and bred in the pumpkin patch, but I’ve always loved the Winter holidays. The mix is not so incongruous…or rather the incongruity works. Winter/Yule/Christmas and all the rest have had an affair with Weird Tales for a long time–from Charles Dickens to The Nightmare Before Christmas. It was not so long ago that winter was a deadly time of year. The harvest is behind; the spring is impossibly far ahead; the nights are long and dark–time to gather round the fire and tell strange stories.

So gather, lumplings!

I had the good fortune of working with the creators of Sparrow & Crowe on an anthology of the winter weird, featuring their eponymous occult investigators. If you like to see more of the odd duo, check out their comic book (try out the free software on Comixology–I’d never thought I’d enjoy reading a comic on a phone, but it’s pretty sweet). Also see Sparrow and Crowe in their original appearance as part of the podcasted audio drama Wormwood: A Serialized Mystery (free to download from the website or iTunes).

Best of all, all proceeds from our anthology of winter weird goes to a charity: 826LA.

Check out my story, “How to Kill Santa.” It mixes Christmas, Santa, Norse undead known as the draugr, and hagfish! It’s Steven King’s It meets A Christmas Carol and a dash of Goonies.