Features twelve brand-new eerie tales by award-winning and best-selling authors, as well as eleven chilling classics. From the Foreword by Colin Dickey The end of December is different. Dead dark, bleak and without remorse. The wind that had a pleasant briskness to it just a few weeks ago now has a knife's edge. The sun sits on the edge of the horizon, distant and unmoved, gone almost as quickly as it appears. The skeletal trees have no comfort left to offer us. One doesn't go outside so much as venture out, bundled up, for necessary provisions before returning to the safety of home. The world has become unforgiving. There is no room for error here. Winter is a time for closing ranks, a time for settling in for the long months. A time when the weather becomes eerie, when the once comforting has become strange. In Halloween the veil between worlds grows thin, but in winter it's ripped clean open, and in the unrelenting cold we see straight through to the other side. And the other side sees straight into us. It is not a time for revelry. It is a time for ghost stories.