Tyche Books' Anthology 'Hauntings And Hoarfrost' Celebrates Winter's Dark Side

Winter. The word conjures snowball fights and sledding, Christmas displays and lazy days spent home from school. Yet grim shades lurk beneath those cheery wonderland joys. Winter is the time when daylight dwindles and skies darken with overcast gloom. The earth becomes barren, trees turn skeletal, and even the animals slumber. Those long, somber months blanketed with snow and ice, a season of ending before spring’s distant rebirth. And through the ceaseless nights we huddle for warmth and ignore the frightful reminders of death’s ever-stalking shadow…

Few ways exist to combat winter’s dread better than curling up with a good book. One person who understands that fact is Canadian editor Rhonda Parrish, who invokes the season’s foreboding menace with her latest Tyche Books offering, Hauntings And Hoarfrost, a multi-author anthology (available January 28th) featuring twenty-two literary interpretations of the season’s spookier side.

Four fur trappers caught in a blizzard take refuge in a desolate shack only to fall prey to a mysterious line of phantom marchers in Alex T. Singer’s claustrophobic ‘White Ones’. Beth Cato’s poem ‘What the Old-Timers Say’ is an eerie reflection about winter’s unforgiving embrace. A woman who’d been at odds with her exacting late mother must confront some uncomfortable remnants from the past in ‘Everything In Its Place’ by Nicole M. Wolverton. A man transformed into a ravenous wraith seeks revenge on the family that betrayed him in Konn Lavery’s ‘Freosan’. The sister who killed her relatives during a snowstorm pursues the sibling who got away in Varian Ross’s wickedly amusing micro-fiction ‘There Was A Tooth In The Coffee’. Lorina Stephens’ ‘A Puppet To His Thoughts’ concerns an 18th-century clerk plunging into madness at his remote colonial outpost. Evangeline and her sisters have spent their entire high-society lives under the constant vigil of their monstrous father until a newly-hired governess arrives in Charlotte E. English’s superb ‘Too Many Midnights’. And a little girl becomes ensnared in a never-ending cycle at a snowbound cabin in Catlyn Ladd’s thought-provoking ‘Footprints In The Forest’.

The anthology’s second stretch commences with Renee Cronley’s poem, ‘The End Of A Cycle’, about a woman returning to the wintry abode filled with the literal momento mori of an abusive relationship. A person stricken with sudden illness during an arctic cold snap becomes lost in fever dreams caused by an ‘Ice Lamp’ in EC Dorgan’s tense tale. Adria Laycraft’s story tells of a general in a kingdom at war with a race of giants who must decide between obeying his monarch’s orders or trusting a mysterious ‘Bloodtaster’ that may be covertly working with the enemy. A newlywed bride discovers her husband’s connection to their town’s clandestine religious cult in Jacob Strunk’s epistolary ‘Darkness Falls On Carversville’. J. D. Harlock’s mournful verse is about what happens to those in our dreams praying we ‘Don’t Wake Up.’ A condemned man must serve his sentence in a deserted hut in order to draw hungry ghosts away from trade caravans in Laura VanArendonk Baugh’s inventive ‘The Penitence Of Ice’. And in the volume’s concluding installment, Sam Hicks’ ‘The Chestnut Avenue’, a boy inadvertently uncovers a hidden world in the woods behind the drab rental house his family occupies during the holidays.

Anthologies can and often do run a risk: by offering variety, a collection virtually guarantees at least one story will disappoint any given reader. Yet as she did with Tyche Books’ previous Elemental series (Fire: Demons, Dragons, and Djinn; Earth: Giants, Golems, and Gargoyles; Air: Slyphs, Spirits, and Swan Maidens; and Water: Selkies, Sirens, and Sea Monsters), Parrish exhibits considerable editorial acumen in arranging the table of contents for Hauntings And Hoarfrost. Devoid of any filler, every story is uniformly entertaining and, aside from some overlapping repetition in setting (more than a few take place at or near isolated cabins), flows seamlessly through an impressive range of character perspectives and authorial voices. There truly is something for everyone here—genres run the gamut from ordinary slice-of-life to high fantasy, slow-burning chillers to outright horror, yet each contains some resonant spark of the supernatural. And while every chosen entry is worthy of praise, seven are deserving of special distinction for their overall execution and creativity.

J.M. Turner’s ‘Neither Rime Nor Reason’ follows a man searching for his wayward brother in the frozen wastes of the North who encounters the spirit of the woman who came between them. A small village caught in a wintry phantasm’s wrathful grip reluctantly entrusts their salvation to a traveling peddler in Kevin Weir’s beautifully melancholy ‘The Wanderer And The Wight’. A man involved in a car accident on a snowy evening finds deliverance isn’t what he anticipated in Brent Nichols’ nail-biting suspense piece, ‘Dark River’.

Written from multiple viewpoints over the course of a century, Beth Goder’s exceptional ‘And We All Come To The End, Around, Around’ concerns a lonely shanty that accumulates souls during the winter months. Bryan Miller’s gripping ‘Morfar’s Nokken’ centers on a boy and his Swedish grandfather going on an ice-fishing trip to confront a hideous underwater creature. And a devilish generational evil is awakened when John moves with his lover onto his grandparents’ abandoned farm in Chadwick Ginther’s unsettling ‘Mile Roads’.

The anthology’s gold standard, however, is its masterful opener, Sarah Von Goetham’s ‘For The Seer, Who Sees In The Snow’, a moving meditation on love, loss, memory, and dreams that follows a psychically sensitive woman drawn into a frightening time loop after her mother’s funeral.

When all is said and done, Parrish must be commended for compiling an unusually strong collection, the kind that will keep its audience reading well past the witching hour. With its vibrant line-up and vivid storytelling, Hauntings And Hoarfrost kicks 2025 off on a high note as the first tome to earn the full 5 (out of 5) on my Fang Scale. Here’s hoping Tyche Books will follow up with anthologies for all seasons in the very near future.