EIGHT VERY BAD NIGHTS

Eleven dark tales offer a perplexing take on the Festival of Lights.

Christmas crime stories often focus on the more secular aspects of the holiday: shopping, presents, parties, snow. But many of the stories Goldberg selects seem to regard Hanukkah—a relatively minor festival—as deeply religious and widely observed, even by secular Jews. The tension between characters’ focus on celebrating the holiday correctly and the egregious aspects of their personal behavior is unsettling. In David L. Ulin’s “Shamash,” an aging man becomes increasingly obsessed with his grandmother’s menorah as his traumatic past prods him to violence. In James D.F. Hannah’s “Twenty Centuries,” a mother turns her back on the death of her adult child to go home and light candles with her new husband. A spurned girlfriend uses a Hanukkah party to get revenge against her boyfriend in Liska Jacobs’ “Dead Weight,” and the annual Hanukkah party at Sucks to Be U Records, with a carefully curated menu of Jewish delicacies, has an equally grisly finale in Jim Ruland’s “The Demo.” A self-diagnosed sociopath loses it when her no-good brother-in-law disrupts her family’s latke celebration in Stefanie Leder’s “Not a Dinner Party Person.” And editor Goldberg seems to regard his hero’s string of thefts, drug deals, and causal mayhem as some sort of Maccabean victory. Only in Lee Goldberg’s “If I Were a Rich Man” does the hero recognize the irony of his appropriation of Jewish cultural symbols in facilitating his crimes.

Feh.