A terrifying new take on the most famous ghost story of all time.

In modern-day Seattle, Detective Stuart (Scrooge) Caine is a jaded homicide cop on the edge of burnout. Every Christmas brings another murder, but this year’s case is different. A brilliant psychopath—dubbed “Humbug” by the press—has made a tradition of killing an entire family every December 25th. With the investigation going cold and his career slipping away, Scrooge receives a visitation on Christmas Eve that shatters his skepticism: the ghost of his former partner, Marley, and three monstrous spirits—manifestations of history’s most notorious unsolved killers: Jack the Ripper, Zodiac, and The Cleveland Torso Murderer.

As the line between nightmare and reality blurs, Scrooge is forced to confront his past, his sins, and the darkness waiting for him on Christmas morning.

Sometimes, the ghosts of Christmas past don’t come to save you…they come to collect

From the Author

Is A Christmas Carol the most famous ghost story ever written? Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” might come close, but I think it probably is. Consider that for a moment: the most popular ghost story in the world (well, the English-speaking world) for the better part of the last two centuries is not only a Christmas tale, but one which features a famously optimistic ending. Who says ours is a cynical age?

I began working on the story that would become Humbug in December 2023, exactly one hundred eighty years after Charles Dickens first published the iconic tale that was its inspiration and model. Funny enough, it was while my wife and I were enjoying our annual screening of The Muppet Christmas Carol that I first contemplated the idea of writing a modern, more transgressive version of the story. Something about an abundance of wholesome cheer always turns me into a contrarian…

Takes a large drink of whiskey and turns pointedly away from deeper self-examination

As I was saying, there have been scores of homages and adaptations of the novella, but there had been no contemporary version, I thought, quite dark enough to give modern audiences a sense of the shivering thrill I imagine was felt by initial readers. A Christmas Carol is, after all, subtitled: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.

Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say, and somewhere along the line, what with all the puppets and cartoons and plays and TV specials, Bill Murray and Patrick Stewart, I think we became just a little too familiar with the story. Scrooge’s redemption is the ultimate point of the narrative, but damned if I didn’t want more fearsome ghosts in this ghost story—I wanted to make it once again equally hopeful and scary. So that’s what I did (or tried to do).

I sincerely hope you enjoy my twisted take on Dickens’s classic and want to thank you for making it a part of your holiday, whatever name you give the occasion, however you choose to celebrate. Now let us begin, shall we?

Here’s a properly macabre ghost story for Christmas, and you only think you know what happens. Turn down the lights and check if your door is locked (not that it will help, I suspect). Tell me, is it cold where you are? Is it dark? Listen carefully. Can you hear that? If I didn’t know better I’d say it almost sounds like the clinking of…chains. And I think they’re getting closer. Are you alone tonight?

Are you sure?

Excerpt

Marley was dead.

The decorated, young police detective’s beloved Harley Super Glide had superbly glided on a patch of black ice, straight into the path of an oncoming truck. Marley’s helmet shattered like an eggshell, her skull quickly following suit, with her brain playing the part of yolk.

So, yeah, Marley Graves was definitely dead.

Living up to her name, as it were.

Certifiably deceased.

No longer of this Earth, you could say.

That, alone, would have been enough to make Detective Stewart “Scrooge” Caine hate Christmas. Hard and disagreeable a man though he famously was, Scrooge had genuinely cared for his partner. He believed in no kind of afterlife and entertained no possibility that such a tragic happening might be part of some unknowable design or deliberate plan at work in the universe. He had no patience for the concept of forgiveness. For Scrooge, the senseless premature death of his best (and only) friend would have been more than sufficient cause to ruin Christmas all on its own.

But there was actually much more behind his vitriolic hatred of the holiday.

It was just after 8 a.m. on Christmas Eve, and Detective Caine stood alone outside the conference room on the top floor of Seattle Police Department headquarters. A tall white man of about sixty, handsome and solidly built, though carrying a noticeable belly, he ran a hand through the thinning ash-gray remains of his hair, smoothing it back from his furrowed brow.

Scrooge wore a beige trench coat and rumpled suit. In warmer months he ditched the coat and would often loosen his tie, perhaps unbutton the collar of his shirt, but otherwise always looked exactly the same regardless of season or occasion. His narrowed eyes were a shade of blue so startlingly light they were almost clear, seemingly scoured clean by the many atrocities to which he’d been forced to bear witness.

Through a collection of snowman decals plastered on the windows, Scrooge saw curtains of rain falling onto the gloomy city outside. It was a particularly soggy and frigid winter in Seattle. The sun had yet to rise that morning, and the drastic temperature drop expected later would mean treacherous roads. He stuffed his hands into his coat pockets, fighting the urge to rip down the laughing cartoons. Or put his fists through the glass. Or both.

For as long as he could remember, Scrooge had hated Christmas.

Even before he was curtly summoned to HQ for an ominously early meeting with the Chief of Police, and a veritable murderer’s row of civil and governmental muckety-mucks, all of them far more concerned with their tablets and cellphones than listening to the detective answer the questions they’d called him there to pose, Scrooge was disgusted by Christmas.

Even before the Christian festival celebrating the birth of Jesus became the same day on which his partner died in a horrific motorcycle accident, Scrooge despised Christmas.

Even before it was chosen as the annual occasion, now five years running, for a vicious serial killer known only as Humbug, a brilliant and sadistic psychopath, to slaughter an entire family for no discernible reason, Scrooge loathed December 25.

But even that hadn’t been the true start of it.

Long before he was first saddled with the nickname Scrooge, a dubious honor bestowed initially by the more cynical members of the city’s sensation-hungry media and later his own snickering colleagues, Detective Caine abhorred everything about the season.

https://www.amazon.com/Humbug-Luciano-Marano/dp/1968532358/