Chill Tidings: Dark Tales of the Christmas Season
This title follows on from previously successful Tales of the Weird Christmas title Spirits of the Season, subverting ideas of traditionally comforting festive anthologies with dark stories of the eerie and uncanny. Exploring stories from beloved authors such as Charles Dickens alongside works by more unexpected names, plucked from the Library archives, Chill Tidings continues a long tradition of ghost stories for Christmas.
‘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. The ghosts are at the door.
Welcome to a new collection of Christmas nightmares, ushering in a fresh host of ghastly phantoms and otherworldly intruders bent on ruining, or partaking in, the most wonderful time of the year. With classic tales from Algernon Blackwood, Elizabeth Bowen, Charlotte Riddell and L. P. Hartley jostling with rare pieces from the sleeping periodicals and literary magazines of the British Library collections, it’s time to open the door and let the real festivities begin.
Tanya Kirk
Tanya Kirk is the Lead Curator of Printed Heritage Collections 1601-1900 at the British Library and is currently the leading expert on 300 years of the Library’s printed collections. She has curated five major exhibitions on topics including Gothic fiction, Shakespeare in performance, the British landscape in literature and most recently Harry Potter: A History of Magic. She has edited two themed collections of ghost stories, The Haunted Library (2016) and Spirits of the Season (2018).
British Library Tales of the Weird
British Library Tales of the Weird consists of fifty-seven books, and the series is set to expand with the upcoming release of two more books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
