Four Gathered on Christmas Eve is a short anthology of Christmas ghost stories in the Victorian tradition by Eric Powell, James Harren, Becky Cloonan, and Mike Mignola. Despite the big names though it’s a pretty weak collection of stories.
The framing device is fun. It’s Christmas Eve 1843 and the four creators gather at Powell’s London home, all of them reimagined as Victorians, to tell their stories. They bicker and snap at one another and none of their characters look like their real selves (Cloonan in particular looks wonderfully mental) - it’s an amusing and playfully meta-ish way to set up the book.
The stories themselves though aren’t very entertaining. Powell/Harren’s The Eyes in the Primordial Dark is a Jules Verne-ish tale about some early cosmonauts haunted by a ghost onboard their Victorian spaceship. Cloonan’s The Kelpie is about a ghost that haunts a river. Mignola’s The Night of the Jaberwok is simply an illustrated retelling of Lewis Carroll’s poem from Through the Looking Glass. Powell’s The Gift of Major Courtenay is about a roving soldier who visits his wealthy friend’s country house but refuses to stay indoors for mysterious reasons.
None of the stories do anything fresh or interesting with the classic ghost story framework and the stories themselves are quite plodding and indistinct. Mignola’s in particular is very unimaginative, simply repeating Carroll’s verse in tedious Tom King fashion. All of the creators draw their own stories and each are gifted illustrators, so the book contains great art at least.
This wasn’t a bad idea for an anthology but unfortunately none of the pieces come together to form any compelling comics. Writing good ghost stories, or even good horror in general, is tough as this uninteresting collection shows. All four creators have done much better work elsewhere - don’t expect much if you’re going to check out Four Gathered on Christmas Eve.
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