A Christmas Menagerie by Keith Simpkins
This Xmas horror novella is no lump of coal
A Christmas Menagerie is a scant 70 pages, but it’s a new Xmas horror tradition I expect to return to at least once each festive season going forwards.
Billed as a “scary, merry anthology of heartwarming horror” the book is actually a quartet of connected short stories each based around a nightmarish version of Santa Claus.
Nightmarish in that this is not the jolly old elf with whom we’re all so familiar — but neither is it the goat-demon Krampus of Central European folklore. No, this Santa Claus is much more unique: a skeletal harbinger of dread who slides down chimneys across the world each Christmas Eve…
Across the four short tales, we follow this most unusual Santa as he visits kids both good and bad. Like a specter from A Christmas Carol, he compels each child to revisit the milestone moments of their lives. Some are at a moral crossroads similar to Scrooge in Dickens’ yuletide classic, but others have already blown beyond any hope for redemption.
And what happens to boys and girls judged bad by this fresh and freaky interpretation of Old Saint Nick? Let’s just say they won’t be ringing in the New Year quite the same as usual.
However — this is by no means a dark or downbeat Xmas horror, the promised “heartwarming” element is also present, most notably in the form of a story centered around a particularly good and charitable young boy who shares what little he has with others even less fortunate that himself. And, finally, we get to see that the “Scary Santa” is just one side of this creepy chimera-Claus; he is simultaneously the bearded and beloved Father Christmas with whom we’re all familiar.
As the narrative progresses, we are made to understand the greater purpose of Santa’s naughty and nice lists, as well as some of the affiliated folklore — and what began as a series of distinctly separate stories feels much more of a whole, so that A Christmas Menagerie is more fairly described as a novella than a collection of short fictions.
Simpkins does a great job of evoking a mood of bittersweet melancholy that suggests a darker holiday mood than most Christmas books. It’s ominous, sinister, and eerie — a macabre take on the holiday for sure — but it is never gory, gross, or gratuitous.
At the same time, there is a sentimental glow that persists throughout the book. Like A Christmas Carol itself, it deals with universal human concerns of empathy, compassion, and goodwill to all men — in short, the very meaning of Christmas.
And so, A Christmas Menagerie successfully delivers on that most unusual conceit that it promises on the cover: heartwarming horror.
What’s also notable about A Christmas Menagerie is that its stories are, essentially, timeless. I mean that in both senses of the word: not only could each of these stories be set at any time between the beginning of the twentieth century (if not earlier) to the modern day, they are also stories that should resonate for many, many years to come.
A delightful creepy Christmas read!