Marcy has always said everyone is welcome at her dinner table on Christmas Eve. That was before her youngest daughter brought a new friend home. A friend with horns and a pitchfork. Now Marcy’s mother won’t shut up about how in her day, girls only brought respectable men home for the holidays. Her brother-in-law is making booze-fueled jokes about how they’ll all have a devil of a time tonight. And her husband, off in the clouds as always, is no help. No one at the table is perfect. Least of all Marcy herself. But has she finally found the one guest she can’t open her heart and her home to? This short story is 2700 words long. It is also available in Santa’s Rejects, a collection of offbeat Christmas stories.

This holiday, spend quality time with family and loved ones—living and dead . . . There's no place like home for the horrordays—unless you'd prefer a romantic midnight walk through a ghost-infested graveyard . . . or a haunted house candlelight dinner with the sexy vampire of your dreams. The (black) magical season is here—and whether it's a solstice séance gone demonically wrong with the incomparable Kim Harrison, a grossly misshapen Christmas with the remarkable Lynsay Sands, a blood-chilling-and-spilling New Year's with the wonderful Marjorie M. Liu, or a super-powered Thanksgiving with the phenomenal Vicki Pettersson, one thing is for certain: in the able hands of these exceptional dark side explorers, the holidays are going to be deliciously hellish!

The tree is trimmed. The mistletoe is hung. The eggnog is spiked. It's time to celebrate the merriest, most heart-warming Christmas ever! Or not? No. Definitely, absolutely not. This Christmas won't be cheerful. It'll be more like Ash vs Evil Dead meets National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Because the Wallace family's annual Christmas Eve party is about to skid off the rails. When a truckload of newly minted ghosts mix with the blizzard of the century, the neighborhood snowmen turn into blood-thirsty fiends. Their ghastly quest for revenge draws them to the brightest, loudest, most Christmasy place in the neighborhood: The home of Lloyd Wallace, hapless employee of the 24/7 Demon Mart, a local corner store where the beer cave doubles as the gate to hell.When the possessed snowmen crash a party packed with unpleasant relatives, back-stabbing socialites, one inconsolable cockroach, three badass demon fighters, and too much alcohol, this picture-perfect holiday soon goes straight to hell.This Christmas story is a companion to 24/7 Demon Mart, a humorous dark fantasy and horror-comedy book series for fans of Christopher Moore (The Stupidest Angel), Terry Pratchett, Mark Cain (Circles in Hell), and Heide Goody (Candy Canes and Buckets of Blood / Last Christmas, an Oddjobs short story).Hell for the Holidays can be read at any point in the 24/7 Demon Mart series AFTER The Graveyard Shift: 24/7 Demon Mart #1.

Who doesn't love to open the mailbox during the holidays and find a newsletter? Whether it's a juicy missive from a college roommate inadvertently revealing her husband's wandering eye, a self-congratulatory account of a cousin's rise to power at the local fast-food joint, or a mind-numbingly detailed account of a year's medical ailments (including photos) from a coworker, they're always entertaining. Christmas Letters from Hell skewers holiday letters of all shapes and sizes, from the ones that come crammed with cheesy graphics or written from the perspective of the recently neutered family dog to those filled with stories of "perfect" family vacations that were clearly anything but. Here Santa uses his holiday letter to let the elves know that he'll be outsourcing to China effective immediately; a bipolar mom tells two very different versions of the year's events; and Osama bin Laden touches base with his high school host family in Minneapolis. Christmas Letters from Hell serves up a steaming, savory blend of the holiday cheer, humor, and twisted truth in our well-intended attempts to stay in touch gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Nocturnicorn Books and FEAR Magazine present 13 sinister seasonal stories to freeze the blood from some of Horror's best indie authors ...

A timeless, utterly charming Christmas fable, beautifully illustrated and destined to become a classic When Paul Auster was asked by The New York Times to write a Christmas story for the Op-Ed page, the result, "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story," led to Auster's collaboration on a film adaptation, Smoke. Now the story has found yet another life in this enchanting illustrated edition with Argentine artist Isol. It begins with a writer's dilemma: he's been asked by The New York Times to write a story that will appear in the paper on Christmas morning. The writer agrees, but he has a problem: How to write an unsentimental Christmas story? He unburdens himself to his friend at his local cigar shop, a colorful character named Auggie Wren. "A Christmas story? Is that all?" Auggie counters. "If you buy me lunch, my friend, I'll tell you the best Christmas story you ever heard. And I guarantee every word of it is true." And an unconventional story it is, involving a lost wallet, a blind woman, and a Christmas dinner. Everything gets turned upside down. What's stealing? What's giving? What's a lie? What's the truth? It's vintage Auster, and pure pleasure: a truly unsentimental but completely affecting tale.