Book description
George Moore is a modern day Scrooge, a futures trader who drives his
staff hard, and won't let his assistant go home to look after her
autistic son on Christmas Eve.
Like Scrooge he is mean with money, but he is also mean with his
sympathies and his time. He has to swerve to avoid putting money in a
charity box and also crosses the road to avoid a family he thinks are
probably gypsies on his way to dinner at a cheap cafeteria. An old man
sitting nearby looks as if he might be looking for the warmth of some
human contact. George refuses to meet his eye and hurries home.
Various slightly odd, even disconcerting things happen. He encounters
a nun who looks like an elderly child. He sees a Santa in the window
of a department store, who seems to emerge from his Grotto, look
confused, and is then surrounded by small elf-like figures who drag
him back behind the curtains. Finally, when he arrives back in his
apartment the old man from the cafeteria suddenly appears and reveals
himself as George's old mentor in trading and in greed. Bill Hill
reveals that he is dead and that he has come to give George a warning.
He warns George he will have three visitors that night, and then in a
flash he disappears.
So it comes about that, as Bill Hill said, George receives three
visitors that Christmas Eve, just as Scrooge was visited by the Ghosts
of Christmas Past, Present and Future. But these are not the ghosties
and sprites that frightened Dickens's readers. George's visitors are
more ambiguous, more frightening to a modern sensibility. They are
visitors that will give even today's reader goose bumps.
They take George on an emotional journey that like Scrooge's journey
- and the journey in another Christmas story, It's a Wonderful
Life - teaches him the true value of Christmas, the true meaning
of life and finally ... how to love. This new classic is both very
scary and very Christmassy.
Whitley Strieber is best known for his horror novels The
Wolfen and The Hunger and for his non-fiction account, Communion.
Strieber also co-authored The Coming Global Superstorm, which inspired
the film about sudden climate change, The Day After Tomorrow.
