Tinsel Trauma is a collection of six holiday horrors centred around holidays most of us celebrate — starting with Dwight D. Eisenhower wanting to preserve the spirit of Thanksgiving, then four very different Christmas themed horrors, and ending it with a murderous bang on New Year’s Eve. 

Nathan D. Ludwig starts this collection with an introduction on the grief and joy that goes hand in hand during the holiday season and as someone who just lost her grandpa on the 1st of December. Well, the grief has been real. It’s not been easy getting into the holiday spirit and while I’d planned on reading a ton of Christmas books in front of a decked out Christmas tree reality has been a lot more different — so when I saw the ARC of Tinsel Trauma on BookSirens, I figured it might be exactly what I needed right now. Some Good Ol’ Tinsel Trauma.

This is genuinely a pretty strong collection of holiday horrors and one that I would absolutely recommend for people who love to read holiday appropriate horror. It’s both hilarious and gory, which is the best sort of holiday horror, and it’s also relatively short for the readers who like a quick read! 

I think, personally, while I liked the whole collection, I absolutely loooved Yul Brynner’s  Yuletide Possession Spectacular. I love stories of lost media (and cursed media!) and the slow build to the end reveal was really great — it’s also a story that feel like it’s right out of a V/H/S segment (maybe they should consider doing a holiday horror anthology in the future and call up mr. Ludwig). 

Tinsel Trauma is definitely a collection I’ll read again in the future when my Christmas needs to be somewhat bloodier. 

// Thank you to Nathan D. Ludwig, GenreBlast Books, and BookSirens for a digital ARC.