The upheavals of adolescence silenced 'A Christmas Carol' for a few years. I became a firebrand atheist. Christmas - humbug! Too commercial! Then I became an agnostic. Christmas was a pro-forma affair, basically a chore. Buy mother a book, dad a new tie, my brother and sister small gifts. Pretend thanks for the fountain pens and shirts I received.

In a reality made of energy, thoughts may literally be things. What if it was intended that we create our own realities after death?

God is wild; I am tame....Night falls and an age ends....We call and are answered through the thick foliage, by voices too strange to be our own.

A real stunner. Want to get swept up on a journey you will never forget and never quite escape? Open THE RITUAL OF ILLUSION and let its magic leap out, grab you, take you places unlike you have ever known.

I put the copy of 'A Christmas Carol' that my grandfather had first read to me 60 years ago on my desk, and I began to write. The result, for better or for worse, is the 'Christmas Spirits.' I plan to read it to my grandson.

I felt an absolutely indescribable sense of menace. It was hell on earth to be there [in the presence of the entities], and yet I couldn't move, couldn't cry out, couldn't get away. I'd lay as still as death, suffering inner agonies. Whatever was there seemed so monstrously ugly, so filthy and dark and sinister. Of course they were demons. They had to be. And they were here and I couldn't get away.

I'm not so sure that horror should be dismissed as something less than literature.