This is the second installment in my behind the scenes series I’m calling Inside the Christmas Cabinet. Let’s open up that box and see what’s inside! Warning: potential spoilers in the following post! If you haven’t yet read it, but still want some more information, go back to the original announcement which includes links to purchase the digital magazine in which my story appears. The first part of Inside the Christmas Cabinet would be fine to read beforehand, but you probably want to read (or listen) to the story itself before reading this one.
When I was writing the initial drafts of “The Christmas Cabinet,” my Christmas horror novelette recently published in Assemble Artifacts Short Story Magazine (available in ebook, Kindle Unlimited, and Audible), set about to convey an uncanny sense of wrongness, a slowly increasing but hard-to-explain dread as we get closer to opening the Christmas Cabinet, where the menace is felt but not quite understood, something that Shirley Jackson and Daphne Du Maurier did so well in their fiction. In the original draft that I submitted to Assemble, the ending stopped earlier in the narrative, the Christmas Cabinet not yet opened, and I intentionally left the conclusion unclear regarding the family’s intentions, Elizabeth’s sanity, and whether there really was a Christmas Cabinet Man at all. Of course, if this had been the final version, my personal take on it would have been that Elizabeth isn’t imagining anything, and that yes, she really is in danger, and no, you certainly don’t want to be around when that box is opened up (I write horror, after all). But it’s sometimes fun to leave a story open to speculation, both for the author and for the reader. This invites the reader to participate in the creative process. How does it all turn out? You get to imagine it yourself!
To return briefly to Shirley Jackson—some would say that such ambiguity might have been inspired by The Haunting of Hill House. It is a personal annoyance of mine that a special kind of stuffy anti-horror literary academic type pretends to himself that Jackson couldn’t have intended there to exist any supernatural goings-on in a good literary masterpiece like Hill House, that it was Eleanor alone who was crazy. In my mind, there is no question in Jackson’s narrative that, while Eleanor has significant mental and emotional problems of her own, Hill House itself is responsible for what follows Montague & Co.’s violation of its threshold. Jackson states plainly in the opening paragraph, before we ever meet Eleanor, that Hill House is insane, and she repeats that line at the novel’s end, after Eleanor’s death.
So while I was certainly trying to channel Jackson for her subtlety, her atmosphere, her skill with injecting social situations with underlying menace, it was not The Haunting of Hill House I was trying to emulate in the original ending to “The Christmas Cabinet.” For that, I think it would be more appropriate to say that Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw was a model, in which I believe he certainly meant to leave us questioning the governess’s perspective.
But since you’ve read “The Christmas Cabinet” in its final form, you already know that I left no shred of doubt about what is making those strange noises coming from the stilted cabinet in the kitchen. The editors at Assemble Artifacts saw potential for a more thrilling and satisfying ending and asked me to write a big, cinematic third act with the cabinet opened and the Christmas Cabinet Man unleashed.
As I got back to work, I drew inspiration from movies like Ready or Not and especially James Wan’s Malignant, which is one of my favorites. (In fact, I wrote two more versions of “The Christmas Cabinet,” one of which ends with Elizabeth burning the house down.) While I’m still fond of my first, ambiguous version, I also love what followed. I’m very proud of the story’s final form as it is presented to readers in Assemble Artifacts, and I hope that you get as much enjoyment from it as I did writing it.
When a babysitter gets stranded with a Hallmark-perfect family over the holidays, their cheerful traditions start to feel less like Christmas spirit and more like ritual. The daughter’s unsettling obsession with a locked cabinet opened only on Christmas causes a growing dread for what is unleashed on December 25.