The Santa at your local mall is probably one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet in your lifetime. The closest thing to the mythical St. Nick, mall Santas listen to your wishes, offer kind words, and even pose for pictures. But in the modern age where technology can make or break a person’s spirit, a group of callous adults — and one asshole teen with a phone and no sense of decency — takes that magic away from the one Santa who needed it the most. The one Santa who still believed in Christmas. The one Santa who would kill for it. In Michael D. A. Clarke’s The Very Naughty List, you’d definitely better watch out!
When a down-on-his-luck shopping mall Santa is abruptly fired just days before Christmas, he decides to unleash holiday hell on the staff who wronged him. As the body count rises, shoppers at Merryvale will soon discover that this Santa’s got a bag full of wicked surprises – and he’s ready to deliver!
The Very Naughty List
I am a Millennial and do remember the age before the internet, but that’s not to say I don’t partake in the various types of social media we have today. That said, The Very Naughty List put all the flaws of short-form content, cancel culture, and soulless jobs front and center. There is no way I couldn’t empathize with a man who had made his livelihood making children smile and filling their hearts with hope. Clarke’s description of the inciting incident was more than enough to make my blood boil. In fact, every interaction was written in a way that didn’t over-explain, yet told an expansive story where we understood each character’s motives, feelings, and intentions. The Very Naughty List is a quick read, but it still holds a world of exposition inside.
Take for example Santa’s work up to his alarming rise towards revenge. One childhood Christmas in particular was enough to turn him from a normal person into a real-life Santa personality. That personality ended up devolving his later relationship with his wife, and her “untimely death” was the nail in the coffin that finally allowed the Merryvale Mall massacre to occur. What some books take hundreds of pages to accomplish, The Very Naughty List does in a few hours reading.
The Very Naughty List may sound like a silly little book about a Christmas-time killer; don’t be fooled by the title though, for it hides some pretty gnarly descriptions of slaughter. Being made to dance as a knife is plunged into your thigh. Being lit on fire as chaos erupts all around you. The mangled body of someone’s child hand-delivered to them on Christmas day. Santa “performing” while wearing an influencer’s skin. It is horrifying… but I loved every minute of it! There is something so satisfying seeing a character not only get his due revenge, but turn a beloved figure into a force of death. The Very Naughty List is the reason why holiday horror has such an avid fanbase. Christmas isn’t the happiest time of year for some people, so it’s cathartic to see destruction and debauchery play out.
The Very Naughty List was a thrill ride that ironically got me in the mood for the holidays. It was cheerful, yet had that overlying feeling of something being wrong (and obviously, something did go wrong). There were parts where I laughed, parts where my eyes widened, and parts where I winced imagining the pain of what was happening on the page. All of The Very Naughty List was enjoyable, and in a short hundred-or-so pages, it wasn’t an overwhelming read in any sense. I really look forward to buying Book 2!
Find The Very Naughty List on Amazon — and check out other books in the series too! Give author Michael D. A. Clarke a follow on Instagram.
