New Book Designed to "Put the Spooky Back Into Christmas"

POPLAR GROVE, Ill. - Nov. 1, 2022 - PRLog -- "Put the Spooky Back Into Christmas: Classic Holiday Horror Tales" is a new collection of vintage horror stories from publisher Tales of Wonder and Dread. While it's a largely forgotten tradition in the United States, spooky stories, ghosts and Christmas go together. In the UK and Canada spooky stories are a normal part of Christmas tradition. The rich tradition of telling scary stories for Christmas has been largely discarded in the United States. Poplar Grove, Illinois' Tales of Wonder and Dread Publishing has been on a quest to change that since the publication of last year's "Horrifying Holiday: Holiday Spookfest."

While not every story in "Put the Spooky Back Into Christmas: Classic Holiday Horror Tales"  is explicitly tied to the Christmas period, all of them are generally considered to be related to that time of year. And, certainly plenty of them are definitely based around it. The collection is intended to bring that old-school spooky to the holidays. The tome gathers stories from Algernon Blackwood, Ada Buisson, Charles Dickens, Berwick Harwood, William Hope Hodgson, Jane Margaret Hooper, M.R. James, Charlotte Riddell and Sir Walter Scott.

2021's "Horrifying Holidays" is a collection of fiction and non-fiction stories, with all the tales having a Christmas angle to them. It actually opens with a poem about Krampus from Northern Illinois poet and writer Frank Coffman. There are modern fiction tales from Gary Hill, Stephen Osborne and Glenn Tilson. Diane Hill and Gary Hill provide non-fiction tales. Classic fiction from John Kendrick Bangs, E.F. Benson, the aforementioned Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell round out the book.

Poplar Grove based Tales of Wonder and Dread Publishing was founded in 2018, and all the T.O.W.D. books have a focus on science fiction, horror or generally macabre type subject matter. The most recent releases from T.O.W.D. to date were "Horrifying Halloween," "It Ends in the Graveyard," "Spooky Berwyn Two," "Spooky Stateline"

"Horrifying Halloween: Halloween Poems and Tales" gathers together poems and stories with a Halloween focus. There are vintage stories from Mary Wilkins Freeman and Eleanor L. Skinner along with retro poems from J. K. Bangs, Joel Benton, George Francis Dawson, H. P. Lovecraft, A.F. Murray, Eleanor L. Skinner and Robert Louis Stevenson. Frank Coffman and Eileen Eggert have new poems in the collection while Del Merritt, Paul Lubaczewsk, R. C. Mulhare and Gary Hill provide new stories.

The book is available at lulu.com/spotlight/strangesound and GaryHillAuthor.com.