The Longest Night

Before the manger there was a fire. Before the carols and the cards and the malls, people on the longest night of the year kept a fire burning because they were not certain the sun would return. They fed it, sang to it, and brought green branches into the house as proof that something was still alive in the white. When the sun rose a little earlier, they called it Yule.

The Longest Night is a collection of stories about what still stands behind the mask of Christmas. In the Ozarks, an old debt brings Krampus and the Wild Hunt down a holler on Christmas Eve. In Vienna, a failing medical student is left with a small black dog that will not stop whining until he works. In a London solicitor's office, the Court of Misrule arrives for twelve nights and turns the law upside down. A miserly innkeeper in the Alps is forced to walk a mountain road in a blizzard. A drowned man in a Scottish fishing town is finally given a brand from the Clavie. An Ozark granny woman teaches a dying child the old rules for the water. Two estranged brothers scatter their father's ashes for the Spook Light on Devil's Promenade. A night clerk in Eureka Springs keeps a ledger for guests who have been checking in for more than a century.

These are stories of bargains, thresholds, and the light that returns. They are told by firelight, on tape reels, in reverse, and by a village. Some end in warm kitchens. Some end in the snow. All of them remember that the old Yule was never tidy. It was a holiday of the doorway-between the year that is dying and the year not yet born-with the wind coming in and something walking up the road toward the house.