Christmas Past A Ghostly Winter Tale by John Adcox

​    Can a Christmas story avoid quaintness? That’s a difficult question. It seems some quaintness is innate. And most of that tends to veer into schmaltziness. It’s just ever so twee, the heartwarming aspects of it all. Even with ghosts, you ask? Yes, even with ghosts.
    But then again, I do love to read thematically. I actually got this book through Netgalley a while back and deliberately saved it for Christmas and sure enough if you read it exactly on Christmas day it does take care of some of the overwrought emotional heartstringtugging. Especially, since it’s actually a fairly decent book in and off itself – a decent story, well written and featuring some very nice photorealistic sort of original art.
     Like so many stories, this is a love story, specifically a story of love interrupted, abbreviated all too soon by tragedy.
     A cultural anthropologist specializing in urban legends uncovers one she can’t resist – primarily because it hits too close to her, a story of a young Navy man named Sam who desperately tries to get to his new wife on Christmas day only to vanish right before midnight. Seen by many London cabbies over the years, he becomes something of a local legend. One our protagonist, devastated by the recent tragic loss of the man she had just married, is determined to figure out.
     Can two lovelorn lonelies help each other on Christmas day? Well, what do you think? Tis, after all, the season.
      This book, appropriately enough, is a love child of a married couple, and is on its most recent reincarnation and it somewhat reads as such, which is to say it reads like a shorter story that’s been padded up. Which implies a certain level of drawn-outness and repetition (does the protagonist really need to tell us three times that she’s an ugly crier sort of thing), so it’s leisurely paced and the investigation of Sam’s story takes an inordinate amount of time for someone who’s meant to be an expert. And yes, it is overtly emotionally charged. But other than that, it’s perfectly readable and indeed perfectly suited for Christmas.
       Thematically, it’s a book that’s determined to tell you there’s no place like home. Determined like it’s heel-clicking Dorothy. Or a cheesy holidays commercial.
       Which is to say, that throughout the book the protagonist’s father (whom she as an adult woman calls Daddy), who continues to call her from Alabama to London at all times of day and night (because he apparently doesn’t understand the time difference) and emotionally manipulate/guilt her into coming home for Christmas. Which is to say that all Sam wants to do is to go home to his wife for the holidays. And also, (NON-CRUCIAL PLOT GIVEAWAY ALERT. BEWARE) the main character’s husband literally dies driving in a storm to get home for the holidays.
       You’d think one of the best things about the last two nightmarish years has been the fact that people no longer HAVE to get home (as designated by their blood family) for the holidays and endure all the concomitant tedium of that. But no, guess where the protagonist winds up at the end of this story? (NON-CRUCIAL PLOT GIVEAWAY ALERT. BEWARE).  That’s right, in her home, in Alabama.
       There, the cheesy moral of social convention driven home with a subtlety of a freight train. Job done.
       Anyway. HoHoHo and Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all. May you celebrate where your heart is. Thanks Netgalley.