C. J. Daley

As soon as I saw this was available, I immediately grabbed a copy and started reading it. Christmas horror is 100% my style this year.

This was a lot darker than I expected from the blurb to be honest. I expected a fast paced home invasion story, and instead I got a ghost story featuring kidnapping, infatuation, absolute control, and conditional love. Mam is not like other mothers. Angelina is constantly watching out so as not to upset her, because at best, she’ll be berated, and at worst…well she doesn’t want to know.

This really broke down and showed the different ways a parent can be over the top controlling. One of my WIP actually features the same type of control, and this was done well enough that I was definitely taking notes. The conditional love was so strongly written and revolting that it made my stomach turn just reading through it.

This was definitely a very Christmasy story, and just about as dark as you can go. Personally a 4/5* for me.

As soon as I saw this cover, I immediately grabbed a copy and started reading it. Christmas horror is 100% my style this year.

Douglas finds Christmas lights, blinking in not-red and not-purple, within the storm drain. He doesn’t know why, but he feels drawn to them and fishes them out. They then cause havoc throughout their little town’s tacky lights competition.

This was pretty much what I gathered from the blurb, and it delivers on it quite well. What I didn’t expect, was the heavy gut punch of grief that this short story packs. I recently attended an indie author’s presentation on Victorian grief, and they spoke of how sons, daughters, siblings are often pushed aside in their grief, making way for the parents first. This exemplified that explanation fantastically. Douglas is dealing with his grief silently, because he is seen as the absence rather than the survival, the continuation after loss. It was really well done and added a much needed layer to the story.

Maybe it’s just me, but the storm drain/kids fighting to save a town when the parents don’t believe them felt very reminiscent of IT to me, as well as a blend of others.

Personally a 4/5*, check this one out!

Much like my last read by Lee Harris, this was included with audible for free, and is also in the middle of a series (Daisy Dalrymple) that I’ve never read.

The novel sets itself up well, without the feeling of needing to read the others. The family has an opportunity to spend Christmas in Cornwall and they decide to do it. But unlike my latest read, some of the additional background information was definitely lacking as I got deeper into the read. Daisy’s husband, much like Christine Bennett’s, is a police officer. But in actuality he seems to be doing most of the investigating, only asking her to take notes. There’s also several parts of the story where he tells her she’s not allowed to come along. So I was a little confused about her sitting back and figuring the whole thing out, something that I’m quite sure is part of the larger series.

This is a 1920’s era series that could also be marketed as cozy. The family speaks of good/ill breeding and the separated roles of men and women (not such a cozy conversation for today’s world). It has the old time feel of an Agatha Christie-esque story, which is more or less what I think of when people say “cozy.” Or basically, mysteries where the murder isn’t gory and not ‘on camera’. It was enjoyable though, and even though it isn’t from that time period, I couldn’t really tell, so that was well done.

Personally a 3/5*. A twisting mystery.