• Reprinted last year by Tor, CHRISTMAS STARS is a surprisingly well-rounded holiday anthology from editor David Hartwell. Offering 25 fantasy and sci-fi tales centered around Christmas, it features some really, really dark stories that make it a standout among similar titles. Like Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star,” which is one scientist’s exploration of the Star of Bethlehem, or Rick Shelley’s “Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men,” in which a holiday miracle has truly sinister origins. There’s also an assassination plot against Santa, an African-American virgin birth and robotic Kris Kringles, among other off-center fare. Contributors include Ray Bradbury, Brian Aldiss and William Gibson.

• Rather than being a standard reprint collection, 2003’s A YULETIDE UNIVERSE: SIXTEEN FANTASTICAL TALES, edited by Brian Thomsen sports some original stories – some quite brief – from such known entities as Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Donald E. Westlake and Richard Matheson, ranging from amusing to serious. Aside from a pointless tale from William Gibson (demonstrating why I can’t read cyberpunk) and a typical head-scratcher from the pretentious Harlan Ellison, the volume is mostly fun, particulary with the inclusion of “A Kidnapped Santa Claus” by WIZARD OF OZ creator L. Frank Baum.

• New for this year is WE THREE DRAGONS, a slim volume from editor Bill Fawcett with – true to its name – three stories involving dragons during the holiday season. Jeff Grubb’s “The Knight, Before Christmas” is just a few pages long, but the other two tales – James M. Ward’s “The Christmas Dragon” and Ed Greenwood’s “Wrathclaw’s Wyrmtide” – could be considered novellas. Personally, dragons aren’t my thing in fiction, but this looks perfectly inoffensive and maybe even a little fun.

• The Richard Dalby-edited MYSTERY FOR CHRISTMAS purports to contain 23 “classic holiday suspense tales,” but I hadn’t heard of any of them. This could be because they all appear to be British. Of these, I found only three worth reading: “The Picture Puzzle,” the locked-room whodunit “Cyanide for Christmas” and “Diary of a Poltergeist,” in which a newly dead guy’s spirit feels up bosomy dinner guests and publicly outs his gay brother. Strangely, iBooks 2004 reprint of MYSTERY appears to be set in 4-point type, so put a magnifiying glass on your wish list this year.

• Conversely, some of mystery’s biggest names are included in MURDER MOST MERRY, a 32-story anthology from 2002, edited by Abigail Browning. Here you’ll find such greats as Lawrence Block, Edward D. Hoch, John D. MacDonald, Anthony Boucher, Nero Wolfe creator Rex Stout and the legendary Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, represented here with the classic Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.” With few exceptions, all the stories originally appeared in issues of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

• And lastly, there’s VERY MERRY MYSTERIES, a 1999 Mystery Guild Lost Classics Omnibus. It has three full “holiday whodunit” novels: Charlotte Macleod’s REST YOU MERRY, Margaret Maron’s CORPUS CHRISTMAS and M.C. Beaton’s A HIGHLAND CHRISTMAS. I’ve never read any of those authors, so I have little to no idea if this is any good. For all I know, these could be the kind of mysteries that only old people like, but I do know that I like that bloody handprint in the window.