Luna Gray
Kevin Johnson’s debut imagines a world where Santa is real, almost everyone agrees he’s good, and the cost of all that joy gets paid by somebody else.
Most Christmas horror starts by taking something comforting and corrupting it. Kevin Johnson’s ‘Twas the Night, out October 13 from William Morrow, does something stranger. He builds a world where Santa Claus is real, almost everybody knows it, and Christmas works exactly as advertised.
Then he asks who has to suffer to keep the miracle running.
A World That Already Agrees
The prologue doesn’t treat Santa as folklore up for debate. He’s a fact. He delivers presents to children all over the world, and only children. His existence is tied to peace, kindness, low crime and an end to war between nations.
That’s a lot of power to hand one being. The prologue also makes room for a fringe of skeptics who call Santa a conspiracy, propaganda, a form of population control. Nobody has definitive physical proof of him. The presents keep showing up anyway. The narrator closes by warning that doubting Santa is dangerous.
Johnson doesn’t have to invent a surveillance state. He just reads the song literally. Santa sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows if you’ve been bad or good. In this world that isn’t a nursery rhyme. It’s policy.
