I meant to review this novel last Christmas but I ran out of time and it didn't happen, so I wanted to make absolutely sure that I reviewed it this Christmas. It's another tasty horror novel from the wonderful folks over at Blood Bound Books that works as an agreeably gruesome antidote to the often saccharine nature of Christmas while never actually being against the season. And it has an impeccable setting for a Christmas horror novel: a town so far north in Canada that the length of the day, only a couple before Christmas, is only five hours.

If you're immediately thinking about '30 Days of Night' then you're already on the right track but there are no vampires here. Instead the massacres are primarily committed by the children of the town under orders from Santa Claus. No, not that one, because there's a fascinating mythology in play here, but he's kind of become that one through belief. The founder of the town of Applecross, Boyd McCulloch had a habit of spreading good cheer to the townsfolk but, one year, he got caught in a blizzard and found himself in a cave confronted by a strange creature. He asked him if he was St. Nicholas and so he became. He promptly renamed the town for his saviour and St. Nicholas it's been ever since.

At least that's the tale that Father McHattie tells a class of children before they murder him. It's here that we join the story because it's about to change again. From a peak of nine thousand, the town has dwindled down to a mere thousand and it's been bought by a Chinese corporation called the Bingzhen Group. They're renaming it to Coldwell Slopes and plan to turn it into a prestigious winter resort. The whole town has gone along with it, with only a couple of loud naysayers, and it's starting to take effect as things go horribly wrong.

The characters we spend our time with are a clever mixture of old faithfuls and new arrivals, with a skew towards the latter. We quickly meet Shona Fleming, who's the pretty new Scottish teacher, and Curtis Tate, the 6'5" school custodian, who's also a black man from Mobile, Alabama, so highly unusual for this far north. They're soon bolstered by Ling Wang, who's the Chinese American CEO of Coldwell Slopes, and whoever else they can find alive, which isn't a particularly large number of people even this early in the novel. The kids take most of them down quickly, the exceptions being people like young Will, who believes Santa killed his mother and stabs a fake Santa by mistake, so is safely locked up in jail when the fit hits the shan.

The children are led by Devon McCullough, descendant of town founder Boyd and eager servant to the creature he also sees as Santa Claus, especially after he drinks his master's eggnog and so gains superpowers like it's the ultimate energy shot but even after he crashes down hard from a ridiculous high. That eggnog leads the novel into body horror, because Devon and his classmates start to transform into Santa's elves, which makes it all the more surreal when they chase around massacring the adults. It becomes even more akin to '30 Days of Night', merely with the mayhem created by children/elves instead of vampires. Much of it unfolds in the dark. If I were to pull out another comparison, I'd suggest that the scenes in the police station often remind of 'Assault on Precinct 13'.

John McNee never quite lets us in on what this creature masquerading as Santa Claus really is but he fleshes out the mythology nicely. The creature has some sort of hold over locals, who know if it is near and take on a stoned demeanour, as if it's suppressing their power to resist. However, it's reliant on belief, which is why it adopted this particular form. In these modern times, more people believe in Santa, even if it's just as an icon rather than a real person, than anyone else, especially around Christmas time. It means that whatever this thing is, it isn't really a monster, it's merely doing whatever it must to survive.

That doesn't mean that we have a heck of a lot of sympathy for it, just as we can't sympathise too deeply with kids like Devon, who sees Santa have sex with his mum and murder his stepdad, then follows his bidding anyway. Sure, the eggnog deepens the bond between the Santa creature and his child minions, weakening any instinct to resist, which is why the two who don't imbibe—one of them because she's a good vegan—don't succumb and get to join the small team of adults trying to survive and find a way to take down Santa.

It's easy to see who the heroes are, and Curtis and Shona are the ones we spend most time with, but it's not always as simple as that. Ling is one of the good guys too, but must counts as the most overt villain in the story, because of what she does to ensure the future of Coldwell Slopes. Maybe some might see it as an acceptable sacrifice—Spock's adage that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one, springs quickly to mind—but I don't think so. It's a special brand of corporate sociopathy.

I wonder how McNee would categorise this book within the myriad subgenres of horror. Most of it counts as survival horror, but it's built on folk horror and exquisitely dark fantasy, dips often into body horror and contains elements of science fiction horror. Of course, it ultimately has to end up as Christmas horror, which I'm happy to see is a vibrant thing, with so many reinventions of Santa Claus as a creep, a tyrant or a violent seeker of revenge. Here, McNee phrases him as a monster, even if it isn't the real Santa. He appears that way and everything plays into that mindset.

More than anything, it's delightfully gruesome, happily taking the pure white of Christmas snow and staining it red with the blood of Coldwell Slopes villagers. Hey, the palette of the season has to be red and white. It's tradition. It also means that this ought to make it easy to translate into graphic novel form, though it would take a daring director to turn it into a movie, given how kids commit most of the murder and mayhem. I can easily imagine the look of that graphic novel; like the silhouetted cover art, it would be as subversive in black, white and red as a nun with a spear through her head. And I'd happily buy it. So, what else has John McNee done? ~~ Hal C F Astell