Bah Humbug

'Tis (still) the season to be drinking, so I thought I would suggest a beer for you during Christmastime, one I had on the 27th of December back in 2018. Bah Humbug by Wychwood Brewery. Because there's a Scrooge in each and everyone of us, which might be coming in strongly on the 27th, when Christmas is already over, and you might as well embrace it in style. With the then brand new glass my wife bought me for Christmas that year. Warning for those who don't like cinnamon: the flavour comes in quite strongly. This beer is also available in Quebec (it says so on the back label). Wychwood Brewery, how I love you. Another warning: the labels on the bottles of Wychwood products are now really lame. This one looked good and was worth the purchase in itself.

Cassandra Darke

'Tis the season to be reading (fa lala, lala..) For tonight's Christmastime reading suggestion, Cassandra Darke by Posy Simmonds. My happy discovery from last year's Christmas reads. Apparently, it is a very freely adapted adaptation of Dicken's Christmas Carol. I must confess, while I did see a good bit of Scrooge in the main character, the parallels between the two works are not that obvious. This graphic novel (with emphasis on the novel bit, as there is a lot of text) stands on its own and the Dickensian source material is more easily identifiable when you read it a second time. But I digress. The action is set from one Christmas season to another. Title characer Cassandra Darke is an elderly art dealer, mean, ugly, selfish, arrogant, wealthy, utterly despicable. She loses her reputation and part of her fortune when she is recognised guilty of fraud. A year later, things go from bad to worse when she finds a gun in the basement where her ex lodger Nicki (who is also the daughter of Cassandra's stepsister and her ex-husband). This is a thriller with brains and heart, it is also a moral tale and a bit of a tragedy, with a protagonist who is not devoid of redeeming qualities... which might not be enough to save her soul, or her life.

Ghost stories from the Pickwick Papers

Before you read today's first countdown to Halloween post (there may be a second one), please read (and if you wish comment) the first part of this original Halloween story. Only on this blog. But right now, I would like to make you discover some ghost stories by Charles Dickens, from The Pickwick Papers. Which I have not read yet, as I read very little of Dickens. A shame, as he wrote some amazing ghost stories, which I truly rediscovered recently (see this post and that one). I guess now they have been obscured with his most famous ghost story, A Christmas Carol. Because yes, it belongs to the genre. Ghost stories have been a Victorian tradition, published and read around Christmastime. You see this influence in one of the tales in the Pickwick Papers. But I digress...

About two decades ago, when I was a child still unable to understand more than a few words in English and not being allowed watch horror movies because of an overprotective mother (my father was a bit more liberal regarding this), my brothers and I once stumbled upon this animated adaptation of the ghost stories told in Dickens novels. It was a weekend afternoon in October, I was desperately seeking to find scary stories, in book or movie form or whatever, to get myself in the mood for Halloween. It was on an English speaking channel, so we understood very little. We only watched the second half of the program, so we missed the first story and the first half of the second. We did understand that the second one was a tragedy, with the main character falling in love with a lady ghost, unable to fulfill his love before his death. And the second one had an uncanny resemblance to A Christmas Carol (in fact, it was its prototype). Which made me like it less, although I did find the goblins spooky. And the second story had plenty of adventures against angry, prone to fight ghosts, so this was the most exciting one for us, not unlike our Halloween game. In a way, not knowing English made us enjoy it more. The first one, I discovered later on, was a parody of ghost story. Not a proper horror story, although there are the classic scary tropes, as they end up deconstructed by a rather smart protagonist.

I rediscovered them years later on YouTube, thanks to PJ. You can find the first part here. As it is divided in six parts, I will not upload them on Vraie Fiction. Instead, I will give you the trailer, which gives you a pretty good idea of what will come. It is not the best animation, far from it, but it has nevertheless plenty of atmosphere and certainly worth a watch. Enjoy.