Reviews - The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

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The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

Read the prologue and the first chapter, hated it, skimmed a few others to see if it would improve but ultimately gave up.

Reading this book feels like when your colleague comes back to work after a holiday and won't stop talking about it for three weeks straight. Every conversation circles back around to 'when I was in Venice/Helsinki/Salzburg...'

I was so excited to read this book considering how much I love ghost stories and dark folklore, especially in winter. And I'm sure there is a lot of interesting content buried in here, but I cannot get past how uppity and self-absorbed the author comes across. She seems more interested in sentimentalising her tenuously relevant holidays than actually delivering the content we came for; the dark side of Christmas. The very title of the book is secondary to her personal experiences across Europe. Frankly, I don't want to read about your glamorised trip to a Venice Carnival in a chapter headed Lords of Misrule - in which we don't learn a thing about Lords of Misrule until two-thirds into the chapter.

This is just a travelogue, and even the asterisked author's notes seem to exist solely for the purpose of talking about herself a bit more. Attempts at comedy fall flat while her privilege gleams from the pages. When we do finally get past the travel talk to the actual history, it's like reading a dry, characterless lecture. I'm just so disappointed.

I'm glad I got a free copy from the publisher because my husband nearly paid 15 solid pounds for this slither of a book as an Xmas present, which would have been a wildly disappointing waste of money.