The Inn Closes for Christmas: and Other Dark Tales Cledwyn Hughes 9781399827645

Discover the lost masterpiece from the father of Celtic noir

The Inn Closes for Christmas is a deliciously dark and haunting tale of one man's nightmarish obsession and how far he'll go to escape it. For fans of Shirley Jackson, MR James, and Andrew Michael Hurley, rediscover this forgotten classic.

The Bank manager, as he had done for so many Christmases now, opened the file. And as always, as he opened it he wondered why he must do this each year. For the man had asked him that he should do this every Christmas for as long as he should live.

In the file, the bank manager sifts through some papers - local newspaper cuttings, a pathologist report, a statement from the town's dentist William Sterrill, and a death notice for his wife, Mrs Doreen Sterrill. But it is the last paper that stops him in his tracks. It is the confession of William Sterrill.

In William's confession we learn about the terrible accident that caused his wife to have her leg amputated, the prosthetic leg she then had to wear, how this leg slowly drives William to murder, and then the descent into madness as we walk through William's nightmares, visions, and thoughts.

The Inn Closes for Christmas is also accompanied by a selection of short stories, full of the uncanny and creepy where Hughes points us towards the darkest places in the human psyche with the lightest of touches.

Cledwyn Hughes was an Anglo-Welsh author of short stories, novels, and narrative non-fiction. He wrote for more than 30 years across a wide range of genres including crime, 'Celtic Noir', children's and topographical writing.

Born in Llansantffraid, Montgomeryshire, he worked as a hospital pharmacist in the north of England before settling down in Wales to write full-time. His work has been featured in magazines such as Suspense, as well as in collections like Woodrow Wyatt's English Stories. He was also a regular contributor to the BBC.

He is best known for the novel The Civil Strangers (1950) and the macabre novella The Inn Closes for Christmas(1947), which remained in print until shortly before his untimely death. His contemporaries called him a 'brilliant young Welshman whose short stories have already established his reputation' (The Spectator).