Krampus: The Yule Lord, written and illustrated by Brom. HarperCollins, 2011. 368 pages. ISBN: 0062095668.
Krampus: The Yule Lord, a Santa Claus novel for people who hate Santa Claus, is undeniably entertaining, but someone would have to be a serious Scrooge to embrace it unreservedly.
This is, so I understand, the second novel by Brom, an illustrator and game designer who made his debut as a novelist with The Child Thief, a subversion of Peter Pan. He followed that up by taking on the jolly saint of Christmas, reimagining him as a brawny, sword-wielding Norse god locked in a mortal duel with a devil-like Krampus in a continuation of the ancient rivalry between Loki and everyone else in the Norse pantheon.
Since Brom’s first talent is drawing, the book is lavishly illustrated. Both the cover and the illustrations throughout are by the author.
Background
Various versions of St. Nicholas from around Europe depict him as accompanied or preceded by some more sinister figure who is responsible for doling out punishments to naughty children while St. Nicholas doles out the presents for the nice ones. Krampus is the Austrian version and currently the most popular, as he has enjoyed several Z-grade horror films, one big-budget Hollywood movie, and a handful of literary interpretations, of which the book before us is arguably the most influential.
Indeed, if you look up Krampus on the internet, one of the first sources you will find on him will be this essay by Tanya Basu at National Geographic. According to Basu, Krampus might be the son of the Hel, the Norse goddess of the underworld.
But—so far, at least—my reading traces this speculation about Krampus’s origins no further back than Brom’s novel. In other words, Basu probably skimmed this book, or perhaps read Brom’s short essay on the history of Krampus at the end, and mistook the author’s inventions for research.
So, thanks to careless slips on the part of essayists like Basu, at least one of Brom’s inventions has now entered popular conceptions of Krampus the Christmas devil: He is now, thanks to Brom, the son of Hel.
Synopsis
The story of Krampus: The Yule Lord takes place in, of all places, West Virginia. The protagonist is Jesse Walker, a young, out-of-work guitarist down on his luck and at his wits’ end: Broke, drunk, and recently abandoned by his wife and daughter, he’s sitting in his busted-up pickup, holding a pistol in his own mouth, when he notices Santa’s sleigh, complete with eight reindeer, parked beside his trailer home. Santa himself soon appears, running from a group of dark-skinned demons with glowing eyes who are apparently attacking him. Santa and the demons shoot off into the air, but not before something crashes through the roof of Jesse’s trailer—something that turns out to be Santa’s magic sack.
As in any good “______ saves Christmas” story, finding Santa’s lost sack sets everything in motion. Jesse uses the sack to make himself a giant pile of gaming consoles with the hopes of convincing the local mob boss, a drug-pusher known as the “General,” to help him sell them—all with the idea of turning his life around and winning back his wife, who’s currently sleeping with a psychopathic, crooked cop who happens to be in the General’s pocket.
But instead of helping Jesse sell hot game consoles, the General puts a hole through his hand with a drill press, beats him up, and kicks him out.
Meanwhile, the black devil-men, we learn, are “Belsnickels,” humans who have been turned into Krampus’s loyal servants by an infusion of his blood. Krampus, formerly the supreme lord of a midwinter fertility rite, is the last living descendant of the trickster god Loki, and the magic sack was originally his before Santa Claus, actually the reincarnated Baldr, stole it. The Belsnickels are after the sack; Krampus wants to use it to free himself from the unbreakable dwarven chains in which Santa Claus placed him centuries ago so that he may restore the celebration of Yule, heal the Earth, remind man of his connection to nature … and mount lots of young maidens in order to bless them with fertile wombs.
Commentary
The story, depicting Krampus and Santa Claus locked in mortal combat with a hapless everyman character caught between, is really goofy. It works mostly because Brom tells it with a straight face and because he balances well between the supernatural elements and the earthier dealings with mobsters and drugs. The protagonist is an average joe, sympathetic but also a loser, who just wants his wife and daughter back. That keeps the book grounded even during its most outlandish moments.
By and large, most of the characters are not memorable, but Krampus himself stands out. Sometimes bloodthirsty, sometimes grandfatherly—and sometimes obnoxiously preachy—he is by turns likable and dislikable. Brom succeeds at giving him a personality that seems mostly ancient, pagan, and believable … except when the book makes the mistake of moralizing.
More than once in this novel, Brom allows Krampus to deliver lengthy speeches. At times, sometimes inappropriate times, he becomes Mr. Exposition, explaining in gigantic infodumps the novel’s complex backstory that is a combination of folklore, pseudo-history, and authorial license. At other times, he expresses—at length—his hatred for the Christian Christmas, which he calls an abomination.
At one point, early in the novel’s second half, Krampus and his gang of Belsnickels attack a church. The pastor understandably mistakes Krampus, with his satyr-like appearance, for Satan. Krampus scoffs at the reverend and also denounces such modern evils as murder, rape, sodomy, and drug-use.
Then, in the scene immediately afterwards, Krampus travels to a dive bar to hold an alcohol-laden feast, which he himself describes with obvious relish as “debauchery”—in other words, he produces exactly the circumstances conducive to murder, rape, sodomy, and drug-use.
Seriously, make up your mind, Krampus. I don’t know anything about Brom or his personal view of the world, but if I didn’t know better, I would say Krampus’s little speech in the church was the author letting his own moral vision get in the way of his storytelling. Is Krampus a god of debauchery or prudery? He can’t be both.
And I must note that, in spite of Krampus’s earlier anticipation of rutting with all the young village maidens and his calls for a debauch, the celebration in the bar is remarkably chaste: Jesse French-kisses an elf maiden who then transforms into a goat, but aside from excessive drinking, nothing else untoward happens.
Analysis
Brom himself can of course be forgiven for any factual mistakes in his book; he is a professional illustrator, not a professional folklorist. He arguably overreaches in his depiction of folkloric elements, but nothing he depicts is outside what should be acceptable for artistic license.
Less forgivable is his depiction of firearms in the book’s gang-related scenes: “Assault rifles” and “clips” both make their customary appearance, suggesting that the author should have done just a smidgen more research. I’m not a gun nut myself, but I make sure to read or talk to people who are before I write about guns.
But back to the folklore: A number of elements both in the novel itself and in the nonfiction epilogue smack of overreach, certainties about the histories of both Krampus and Yule, which are in fact far from certain. The reality is that we know next to nothing about Yule, how it was celebrated, and what it represented—although there are sources indicating that it involved a hell of a lot of animal sacrifice and blood-sprinkling, which makes Krampus’s occasional hippie-like whinging about nature seem all the more out of place.
Although Brom depicts Krampus complaining that Christians “stole” traditions from him, Brom was able to fill in gaps in our knowledge about this ancient feast only by—ironically—borrowing heavily from Christmas.
This kind of overreach is now common: As I write this, October is nearly upon us, so we will soon be hearing repeatedly, as if it is established fact and not the product of guesswork, that the Christian holiday of Halloween is a perversion of a Celtic celebration called Samhain.
But really, we know jack-all about Samhain—what it was, what it meant, and what influence it had on All Hallows’ Eve. We accept unquestioningly that Christians must have borrowed everything in their holidays, that in two millennia they were somehow incapable of developing any folklore or rituals of their own, only because it is currently fashionable to do so.
The truth is that every agricultural society, Christian or otherwise, has—for reasons too obvious to state—held festivals at midwinter, midsummer, springtime, and harvest. Some borrowing between cultures is expected, but untangling those threads is next to impossible. Doing so is only considered important these days for two opposite and contradictory reasons: The first is a pious, largely Protestant notion that Christianity must forever be pure and unsullied in an embryonic state with no accretions; and the second is straight-up hatred for Christianity and Christians, with the goofy idea that pointing out borrowings or influences in their traditions must somehow diminish them.
I must refrain from speculating about Brom’s personal motives, but his book appears to be operating more from the second motive than the first. Every once in a while, Krampus can’t help but get up on a neo-pagan soapbox, and it is at those moments that the character sounds phony. This supposed god of the ancient Norsemen at one point delivers a resounding condemnation of modern ills such as rape, murder, sodomy, and drug-use, as if the savage Vikings had never heard of such things—when in fact they had all four, even the drugs, in abundance. In his epilogue, in which he discusses some of the sources of his ideas, Brom mentions concern over methamphetamines in rural America, which partly explains Krampus’s anachronistic concern-trolling: Brom’s real-life concern is understandable, but it still makes no sense for Krampus to be going “oh noes drugs” when he is supposedly the god of bacchanalias and debauches.
More than anything, however, what demonstrates the book’s smug, anti-Christian stance is the insistence, unexplained, on referring to the Christian God with feminine pronouns. It is as if Brom were saying, “Ha, Christian! I just called your god ‘she’! Whatcha think about that, bitch?”
I don’t know about anyone else, but my Christian answer is, “Then you should call her Goddess, dumbass. If you want to play petty games with divine pronouns, then get your nouns right, too.”
Anyway, this is altogether a fun book, though it is at times too preachy. It balances well between the supernatural and more mundane elements, even if both are cartoonish. Krampus: The Yule Lord is good for a single read, but I don’t think it would be worth reading twice, and I can’t see it becoming a part of anyone’s holiday tradition like A Christmas Carol. While reading it, I sometimes thought it was written about a century or half-century too late; it wants very much to be edgy and shocking, but its cussing, its mob violence, and its Christ-hatred are now so fashionable in literature as to be trite. It succeeds at being entertaining, but in spite of an obviously huge effort, it fails to break any new ground.
