THE LONGEST WATCH

Stay awake. Stay steady. The longest night asks nothing more of you than that.

Eighteen quiet, unsettling tales drawn from an old Scottish custom older than the tree or the stocking: that someone in the house sit up through the whole of Christmas Eve night, keeping watch by a fire, a body, or simply the dark, until the first grey light of Christmas morning releases them from the duty.

A young man keeps his family's fire through the night and finds the chair opposite his own quietly occupied. A lighthouse keeper glimpses a light on water where no vessel has any business being. A skeptical minister sets out to prove the whole custom rustic nonsense, and privately can't quite manage it. Not every watch in this collection produces something worth the telling - several produce nothing at all beyond a tired watcher and a burned-down candle, and the old custom never once considered that any kind of failure.

These are not stories built on jump scares or gore. The dread here is quieter and, I think, warmer than in my other collections - the particular comfort and unease, in equal measure, of sitting up once a year in the cold and the dark to prove to yourself you still know how to keep faith with something older than your own understanding of why.

Perfect for reading by your own fire this Christmas Eve, with company or without it.