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Christmas may come but once a year but evil, intrigue and malevolence are everyday events. Within this volume Christmas is a time when these dark forces form and coalesce to take life and liberty from people who may and who may not deserve the spin of its wheel. Some are merely evil, others have the beginnings of a conscience that displays itself in a dialogue with the devil, or perhaps only themselves. But, in this volume Christmas takes a ringside seat to the horrors of the human heart.

The ninth month of the Gregorian calendar strides onto stage with the autumn equinox and the first glimpses of a new season. Nature may adorn the coming days with a blaze of Indian summer, or the early showers and storms of autumn may begin their symphony. Regardless of Nature’s elemental whims the landscape is a riot of colours, hues and swathes, the harvest of crops continues, the orchards heave with bounty.

During the Victorian era the publishing of magazines and periodicals accelerated at a phenomenal rate. This really was mass market publishing to a hungry audience eager for literary sustenance. Many of our greatest authors contributed and expanded their reach whilst many fledging authors also found a ready source for their nascent works and careers. Amongst the very many was ‘The Yellow Book’.

Richard Thomas Gallienne was born in Liverpool on 20th January, 1866. His first job was in an accountant's office, but this was quickly abandoned to pursue his first love as a professional writer. His first work, My Ladies’ Sonnets, was published in 1887. In 1889 he became, for a brief time, literary secretary to Wilson Barrett the manager, actor, and playwright. Barrett enjoyed immense success with the staging of melodramas, which would later reach a peak with the historical tragedy The Sign of the Cross (1895).

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author? Ambrose Bierce is an author whose words take us one way and then send us another. These miniature masterpieces all have a central truth and plausibility that seems to vanish in an ending that can be anything from wry, to shocking to hallucinatory.

Poetry has over the centuries grouped poets or poems into many different themes and movements. Amongst its most unusual movements are the English wordsmiths, The Silver Poets. This select band lived during the sixteenth century reign of Queen Elizabeth 1st. Amongst their storied ranks were Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney, Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Davies, Michael Drayton and Mary Sidney (Herbert), the Countess of Pembroke.

Katherine Tynan was born on January 23rd, 1859, into a large farming family in Clondalkin, County Dublin, and educated at a convent school in Drogheda. Her output was prolific; some sources have her as the author of almost a 100 novels. Here we concentrate on her poetry. Amongst the classics such as ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’ are numerous war poems. She is now sometimes grouped amongst the War Poets of the First World War.

Anton Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, Kate Chopin. These three names thrill the literary world as well as our own. They have gravitas, they have knowledge, experience and they have the literary style and panache to seduce our imagined world. Each has written a short story on pleasured lips placed on another’s flesh. For Chekhov it was a kiss in a darkened room that happened by mistake. Who was she? For Chopin it was a kiss that almost derailed a hoped-for marriage proposal. Why did he do that? For de Maupassant it was a niece seeking advice from her Aunt on when to kiss and whom. And did she?

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. The Russian Literary Tradition has justly earned a magnificent reputation. The Russian Empire of the Czars was a huge and disparate patchwork of peoples ruled by an overbearing elite that employed a middle-class bureaucracy to keep the working class firmly underfoot. Within its vaulted ranks are a role call of many of the greatest literary talents of the ages.

John William Polidori was born on 7th September 1795, in London, to Gaetano Polidori. In 1816 Dr Polidori was given the job of Byron’s personal physician and accompanied him on a trip through Europe. The publisher John Murray offered Polidori £500 to keep a diary of their travels. At the Villa Diodati, Byron’s rented villa at Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the pair met with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont.

In 1890 W. B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys founded a poetry club. Based mainly at Fleet Street’s immortal ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese’ pub, with occasional appearances at the Domino room in the Café Royal, poets gathered together to dine and drink. Whilst it was based on a core of poets, many others attended on an ad hoc basis including Oscar Wilde, Francis Thompson & Lord Alfred Douglas. The camaraderie, banter and poetry that played out in their dreams, ambitions and for many, their difficult lives led Yeats to call them ‘the tragic generation’.

The ballad is one of the oldest poetic forms in English and are simply poems or songs that tell a story. Maybe it’s because of childhood associations or that we all enjoy a cracking good story told in rhyme but as this volume demonstrates, the ballad has endless appeal. We include favourites such as Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s The Ballad of the Harp Weaver, Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee as well as classics such as Sir Patrick Spens, the Ballad of Reading Gaol by Wilde and La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Keats.

James Thomson was born in Port Glasgow, Scotland, on the 23rd November 1834. Possessing a powerful and unique writing gift, unfortunately, his own demons curtailed him from leaving a larger literary legacy. Stories, essays and poems were submitted to various publications during his life and undoubtedly the creative high point of his life is ‘The City of Dreadful Night’. Within its bleak verse are the struggles of Thomson’s own chaotic tortures with depression, insomnia and alcoholism in the uncaring world that surrounded him.

Ernest Bramah was born on 20th March 1868. He was an intensely private man and very little about his life was ever released. He obtained success in his own right with the creation of the storyteller Kai Lung with humourous tales set in China, usually laced with fantasy elements. There seems to have been a certain vogue for stories with an oriental element at this time, which Bramah was happy to take advantage of. In 1914 Bramah created the blind detective Max Carrados. Despite the obvious obstacle to his deductive powers, he was a literary and commercial success.

The year reaches its end with the Twelfth month. The landscape may be bleak, a sculpture of lines, monochrome dominates. The air carries the sounds of winter: wind, storms, silence. Our classic poets flex their lexicons with verse that describes all manner of events, sights and sounds. Among their ranks are Hardy, Shakespeare, Rossetti, Nesbit, Burns and a wealth of others, who, with their thoughts and desires express the world in lines of inky marvel.

Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was born on August 28th, 1814, at 45 Lower Dominick Street, Dublin, into a literary family with Huguenot, Irish and English roots. Between 1838 and 1840 Le Fanu had written and published twelve stories which purported to be the literary remains of an 18th-century Catholic priest called Father Purcell. Set mostly in Ireland they include classic stories of gothic horror, with grim, shadowed castles, as well as supernatural visitations from beyond the grave, together with madness and suicide. 

Barry Eric Odell Pain was born at 3 Sydney Street in Cambridge, on 28th September 1864. He was one of 4 children. It is often said that Pain was discovered by Robert Louis Stevenson, who compared his work to that of Guy de Maupassant. It’s an apt comparison. Pain was also a master of disturbing prose but able to inject parody and light comedy into many of his works. A simple premise could in his hands suddenly expand into a world very real but somehow emotionally fraught and on the very edge of darkness as many of these short stories demonstrate.

Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was born on August 5th, 1850, near Dieppe in France. In 1880 he published what is considered his first great work, ‘Boule de Suif’, (translated as as ‘Dumpling’, ‘Butterball’, ‘Ball of Fat’, or ‘Ball of Lard’), which met with a success that was both instant and overwhelming. Flaubert at once acknowledged that it was ‘a masterpiece that will endure.’ Maupassant had used his talents and experiences in the war to create something unique.

Amy Levy was born in London, England, in 1861, the second of seven in a fairly wealthy Anglo-Jewish family. The children read and participated in secular literary activities and became firmly integrated into Victorian life. Amy’s writing career began early; her poem ‘Ida Grey’ appeared when she was only fourteen. Her acclaimed short stories ‘Cohen of Trinity’ and ‘Wise in Their Generation,’ were published by Oscar Wilde in his magazine ‘Women's World’.

William Hope Hodgson was born in Essex, England, on November 15th, 1877. Over his short career he produced a large body of work which explored and covered many genres. From horror, to science fiction, to stories on the sea, where he had spent much of his early life. One of his most memorable creations was his Carnacki, Supernatural Detective creation. This fused together his passion for sleuthing and interest in the Occult. It was a memorable success.