Krampus: The Yule Lord

3,75 stars, I guess.
So here we have a bit of an oddity. We all know our feel good, syrupy reads about Christmas with cute children, pets, some kind of typical tragedies, then touching resolutions. Brom (Mr. Brom? I'm just weird with this one name thing, you're not Voldemort or Prince) said fuck all that, you'll have blood for Christmas.

In this one we have a failed Southern musician, with a fallen apart family, who somehow ends up in the fight between Santa, who is a Nordic deity and Krampus, who wants us all to return to our old ways of Christmas. Oh, and murder. There is a bit of brutal, splatter-y murder with guts. Enjoy.

This is where my kind of ambivalent feelings come. Our human protagonist, Jesse is not a particularly successful guy, his wife and kid left him, his career doesn't exist, got into some trouble with the local, really corrupt law enforcement. He's a pleasant enough fellow, I guess we wouldn't have much hate for each other, but... sometimes I feel like it's Krampus I want to read about, not him. Then again, it's not a fair thing, because fuck, not many people can compete with a mysterious, ancient creature who freaks children out, then gives them money.

Now Krampus, that is a cool one. You just can't know him. At one point he's scary and all wrong, the next he's actually an almost sweet guy. It's all just a matter of perspective. I guess that is something I loved about this book; when you read Krampus or Santa, you can understand them, respectively. You won't be able to simply, 100% hate either or them. (Yeah, I kind of rooted for Krampus, but I love slightly dark ones, deal with it.) I can really appreciate that.

The only character who felt a bit too sickly sweet and oh so tragic was Isabel, one of the sidekicks of Krampus . Didn't care for her much. Sorry.

The whole book has this mysterious, slightly twisted feel, which works really well with the prose, so I don't think anyone will have a huge issue with that. My only slight annoyance was that at the beginning there was a bit too much “Santa man” and “devil men”. Another GIGANTIC thing (for me, heh) that added a ton to the atmosphere was the art. Holy shit, it's brilliant stuff. You know, our Mr. Brom is a visual artist as well as a writer, so he sprinkled in some artwork, which was really something I enjoyed.

All in all, it was really hard to rate this book and I'm still a bit annoyed that with the updates Goodreads still doesn't allow half stars. I enjoyed it, I put it on my my-jam shelf, but sometimes it felt like not enough of the magical creatures and a bit too much of the humans screwing around and doing their stuff. Loved the change of pace for Christmas, though, especially after the endless wave of typical family movies. Would recommend it to the lovers of weird.