It’s Christmas Eve in Victorian London, and Ebony Scrooge is hard at work tinkering with weapons of mass destruction and avoiding all things Christmas. 
When the spirit of her deceased partner, Jacqueline Marley, warns Ebony that she will be visited by three ghosts, Ebony writes the visitation off as a dream. 
But on this Christmas Eve, the spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future must try to pull off a miracle, restoring Ebony’s heart before it’s too late.

‘Hauntings and Humbug‘ was a perfect Christmas read. It is a gender inverted retelling of Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol‘ with a steampunk twist, although I think that description undersells it. This is more than a retelling with women playing the male leads pantomime style. It’s a complete reimagining of the ideas behind ‘A Christmas Carol’ which starts by thinking about what it would mean if Marley and Scrooge had been women working in a partnership in Victorian England, which immediately prompts three important changes to the story.

The first change is that the story has to be told in an alternative version of Victorian England in which women were allowed to own and operate businesses and, if you’re going to have an alternative Victorian England, why not make it a Steampunk one and have Marley and Scrooge working as tinkers creating automata that start as fairground rides and, as the money becomes tight, evolves into the manufacture of automated weapons platforms.

The second change is that the events that have shaped Ebony Scrooge and led her to become a woman who has locked herself away from the world all relate to being a woman: the accidental death of her parents, the death of her daughter, the death of her sister in childbirth and the failure of her marriage, have all mauled Ebony and left her crippled by grief and anger. I found Ebony’s traumas and her reaction to them far more engaging than Scrooge’s mild regrets for loss of an early romance in favour of a career and his distress at how few people turned up at his funeral.

The third change is to how the three Spirits of Christmas manifest to Ebony. They serve the same purpose as the ones in ‘A Christmas Carol’ but these Sprits embrace both who Ebony is and the Steampunk creations that inhabit her imagination. I found the changes refreshing. They kept me engaged with the story and they told me more about Ebony. 

‘Hauntings and Humbug‘ kept the almost fairytale tone of ‘A Christmas Carol‘ but still managed to deliver an emotional punch that was more powerful than the original story. I thought Melanie Karsak did a great job and depicting grief and what it does to us and seeding the hope that it can be something that we can prevent from tyranising us and stopping us from living a full life.