• Selected by Gaynor Jones

The Molotov Cocktail is one of my favourite online publications and I have a particular fondness for their regular themed contests. This shortlisted piece is a favourite of mine, and a much more traditional tale than the Shearman piece. I love stories that meld horror with folklore, that legitimately seem like they could have been passed down through the years, and such is the case here with the ‘wassailers’.

The story itself has quite a childlike, almost fairy-tale telling, as befits an oral folk tale, with simple language and even a song. The wassailers are ghastly, ghostly creatures who change before the narrator’s eyes. But there’s a couple of moments that heighten the horror for me, beyond the description of the wassailers, notably the almost throwaway line early on, “I haven’t had a sister since then.” And then the almost comically blunt description of poor Mrs Miser who, for whatever reason, did not meet the wassailer’s requirements. “I followed the bloody footprints to Mrs Miser’s house and witnessed the gruesome aftermath of the wassailers’ last visit. She was everywhere.”

First published in The Molotov Cocktail, November 2022 and available to read here

You can read Gaynor Jones’s own Personal Anthology and other contributions here