Varla Ventura, fan favorite on Huffington Post’s Weird News, frequent guest on Coast to Coast, and bestselling author of The Book of the Bizarre and Beyond Bizarre, introduces a new Weiser Books Collection of forgotten crypto-classics. Magical Creatures is a hair-raising herd of affordable digital editions, curated with Varla’s affectionate and unerring eye for the fantastic.

At Christmas time we so often associate Charles Dickens with his classic A Christmas Carol. In this unlikely Christmas tale, first published in 1894, in Christmas Stories you won’t find many mentions of Yuletide feasts or golden stores. Instead you will be treated to a story of a different ilk. In a very Clue-like scenario, the host invites several guests to take residence in the house for one night, the Twelfth Night of Christmas, each taking a room of their own--The Clock Room, The Cupboard Room, The Garden Room, and so on.

Dickens also used this story as the setting for a collection of stories in which he commissioned various writers to take on a character and a room from the story he had written, and detail the character's encounter with the ghost of the room. Watch for each of these stories to come in the Paranormal Parlor collection!