I started writing these ghost stories to send to friends and family in place of Christmas cards in 2005 and have kept up the tradition (almost) every winter solstice since. So I owe an enormous and obvious debt to the don of the genre, M.R. James, who delivered his ghost stories to his selected favourites in his rooms at Cambridge each Christmas Eve.
But to amuse myself (and hopefully some of the recipients who actually bothered to open the email attachments over the years), I included deliberate little homages to other writers along the way – seasonably inappropriate Easter eggs, you might call them – as well as wearing my influences on my sleeve as boldly as the reindeer on a Christmas jumper. You may have spotted one or two of them along the way.
Don’t worry, they’re not like Pokémon: you don’t have to catch them all. But this collection would not and could not exist were it not for:
Robert Aickman, Joan Aiken, Clive Barker, Julia Bell, Emily Brontë, Angela Carter, Aidan Chambers, Mark Z. Danielewski, Drew and John Erick Dowdle, Peter Firmin, Neil Gaiman, Alan Garner, Edward Gorey, Edward Grey, the Brothers Grimm, Peter Haining, Robin Hardy, Robert A. Heinlein, W.W. Jacobs, Tina Jackson, Tove Jansson, James Joyce, Stephen King, Nigel Kneale, Andrew Lang, C.S. Lewis, Ian Livingstone, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Lumley, Will Maclean, Ruth Manning-Sanders, Daphne du Maurier, Carey Miller, Alan Moore, Ursula Moray Williams, Wilfred Owen, E. Nesbit, Charles Perrault, Oliver Postgate, Anthony Read, Talbot Rothwell, Dan Rhodes, Anthony Shaffer, Julian Simpson, Andrew Smith, Christopher Smith, Catherine Storr, Vera Southgate, Milton Subotsky, Alan Temperley, Elizabeth Warren, Joss Whedon, John Wyndham.
Seek out their work. Devour it. Let them live on …