The Night Before Krampus
A Brief History of the Krampus and a Free Very Spooky Book That Doubles as a Homage to Dickens's A Christmas Carol
I’d like to say a few words about the Krampus, the anti-St. Nicholas of Christmas lore. Another way of viewing him is to call him St. Nicholas’s alter-ego, or dark double. Most of you are probably familiar with this monstrosity from the spate of movies that have come out since 2015, the best being Michael Dougherty’s Krampus, starring Adam Scott and Toni Collette. That movie stays true to the Krampus legend, and on its own, it is an excellent darkly comic horror movie with a nice twist at the end, and being a fan of good horror movies, the Johnsons religiously watch it every Christmas.
The Krampus movies that followed Dougherty’s reimagining of the Krampus legend, quite frankly, stink. Consequently, along with the size of Donald Trump’s hands and his beautiful female family members and lawyers who, for some inexplicable reason, keep sucking in their cheeks every time the camera rolls, I will pass on disparaging those movies.
And so, you might ask, who or what is the Krampus, Dr. Johnson?
I think Wikipedia does an adequate job describing the Krampus in the first paragraph of its essay:
“The Krampus is a horned, anthropomorphic figure in the Central and Eastern Alpine Folklore of Europe who, during the Advent season, scares children who have misbehaved. Assisting Saint Nicholas, or Santa Claus, the pair visit children on the night of December 6, with Saint Nicholas rewarding the well-behaved children with gifts such as oranges, dried fruit, walnuts and chocolate, while the badly behaved ones only receive punishment from Krampus with birch rods. Krampus day itself, on the other hand, is on the 5th of December.”
Most legends also suggests that the Krampus often decides to forego whipping kids and instead throws them into a sack and carries them off to hell.
Which adds a deliciously wicked dimension to Christmas, not to mention an incentive for children to be good boys and girls.
The creature itself is conceived of as being part-man, part-goat, with hooves, sharp fangs, and a lolling tongue—the latter attribute which has often sexualized him and encouraged critics to compare him to a Dionysian centaur figure.
Now to my point:
A few years before Dougherty’s movie, I came across the Krampus legend and read extensively about it, interested in its literal history but also in how it serves as a symbol for the Freudian id gone out of control. What resulted was my novel The Night Before Krampus—a book that is directed, as the movie was, at an audience from middle graders to adults.
See description and trailer here: The Night Before Krampus (Description)
At the same time as I was writing my book, I was rereading Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which deals so wonderfully with greed and the kind of voraciousness that lust for money breeds, not unlike the physical appetite of the Krampus. How could I join these two stories, I wondered? What resulted was my novel.
What a winner of a book, I thought, as I sent it to my agent, only to discover that every big publisher, and I mean “every” one of them, even ones I published with, passed on it because they said it was a “seasonal” novel, and so wouldn’t sell year-round.
Now that would have been acceptable if there weren’t books like The Polar Express that continue to sell more and more copies every year. What publisher wouldn’t want a book that had the possibility of doing that?
But those same publishers said that they would be interested in it if I changed the Krampus into a different evil creature (a vampire of course) that didn’t show up at Christmas, and then they went on and on, wanting me to write their book, not mine.
I needed the money, but I just couldn’t do that. The lore of the Krampus stresses the binary choice between the Krampus (evil) and St. Nicholas (good), but I had done something different, complicating the narrative by including both good and bad Krampuses, and I refused to give that up. Consequently, I published the novella through what Amazon calls their White Glove program, where I worked through Amazon and my agency, so that it wouldn’t cost me money, though Amazon made clear that all publicity was up to me.
What followed was the greatest Pyrrhic victory of my career. I wrote and published the book as I wanted to, and although it has received very good reviews on Amazon and Goodreads and has been used in middle-school and even college classes, without the publicity apparatus of a big publisher, it’s chances of ever becoming a best seller will always be slim to none.
Granted, it was optioned by some young filmmakers, but they couldn’t raise enough money to begin production. Still, in our field, one never knows. An acquaintance of mine wrote a literary western novel about a washed-up alcoholic country western singer, which his agent tried to sell to the movies. All of their marketing divisions passed on it, arguing, “Who the hell wants to watch a movie about a washed-up alcoholic country western singer.” Twenty-five years later my acquaintance found himself at the Academy Awards watching Jeff Bridges get an Oscar for playing that country western singer in the movie based on his book, Crazy Heart.
So should I have caved in and and changed the book. Was it worth it to stick to my guns??
Shit, yeah.
And so, because I have rights to the book now, I offer it here for free The Night Before Krampus hoping you might enjoy it so much that you’ll want a paperback copy from Amazon The Night Before Krampus (Amazon) and enjoy it as a spooky family read.
Whatever, Merry Krampus to you and yours.
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories
Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments even though he has a publisher for it by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss