The Thief of Always, by Clive Barker 

Happy December! I’m kicking off this month of book reviews with a kinda-sorta Christmas story.

The Thief of Always came out in the early 90s, just a few years before the huge YA book boom. Did it pave the way for Harry Potter and the Hunger Games and (sigh) Twilight? No. Not really. But if it came out just a few years later, I imagine this would have been a much bigger, more popular book. Cool people know about this book, but there are a lot who have never heard of it. If you’re one of those total idiot losers who didn’t know about The Thief of Always until this very paragraph, you’re welcome. I just changed your entire life. 

The book tells the story of a kid who is invited to a magical mysterious house that experiences all four seasons of the year every day. So every day you get Christmas, you get Halloween, you get a birthday, you get Arbor Day….what could go wrong? Hint: A lot.

Clive Barker is most known for his mature (sometimes x-rated) horror stories. The guy writes some very disturbing fiction, but he reigns all the gore and sex in for this family-friendly story. It would be like finding out the director of The Human Centipede also also wrote an episode of Gilmore Girls. (He didn’t.) 

I loved this when I read it in middle school, and still enjoyed it decades later when I reread it. While not strictly about Christmas, if we consider Die Hard a Christmas Movie (because it is!), then this is a Christmas book. That’s just science. Because it has Christmas in it, this is a Christmas sentence, even if it also contains spiders and an Easter walrus. See how that works?

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