Sunless SolsticeStrange Christmas Tales for the Longest Nights
Another festive edition to the Tales of the Weird series, following on from Spirits of the Season and Chill Tidings. A unique selection ranging from the spooky haunted houses of Victorian Christmastime to experimental twentieth-century horrors. It offers a truly international scope of stories, from the pine forests of Canada to the peaks of the Alps.
Like any other boy I expected ghost stories at Christmas, that was the time for them. What I had not expected, and now feared, was that such things should actually become real.
Strange things happen on the dark wintry nights of December. Welcome to a new collection of haunting Christmas tales, ranging from traditional Victorian chillers to weird and uncanny episodes by twentieth-century horror masters including Daphne du Maurier and Robert Aickman.
Lurking in the blizzard are menacing cat spirits, vengeful trees, malignant forces on the mountainside and a skater skirting the line between the mortal and spiritual realms. Wrap up warm – and prepare for the longest nights of all
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
The British Library Tales of the Weird series revives and unearths classic strange fiction from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the form of novels, single-author collections and thematic anthologies, complete with new introductions and fascinating notes by expert editors.
British Library Tales of the Weird consists of seventy-two books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
