One Who Saw by A.M. Burrage
My rating: 3/5 cats
this holiday season, i am going to read through ‘seth’s christmas ghost stories’ line on biblioasis, and i encourage you to do the same. the books are so cute and tiny, you can stuff someone’s stocking or dreidel with ’em! the cover art and interior illustrations are by seth, and they are seasonally spoooooky, blending the spirit of halloween with christmas cheer the way nature, and jack skellington, intended.
this one is not a christmas ghost story, per se, but a ghost story for christmas, if that distinction makes sense. telling ghost stories on christmas eve is a bygone tradition this series hopes to bring back into vogue, but this is not A Christmas Carol or even Scrooged. it is an utterly secular ghost story whose moral seems to be “curiosity killed the cat.” or rather, curiosity did something much worse and much more subtle than that.
i usually get bored with olde-timey ghost stories because they take their time and the payoff is usually more… implicit than i like, but this one had a nicely haunting atmosphere. i think someone with a talent for oral storytelling could make this even spookier and i invite them to my house on christmas for spooky merriment and cookies and eggnog.
10 more to go!
