Cookies, Confessions, and Christmas Carnage: A Review of Merry with All That Murder by Jack Steen

The Asylum Confession Files #6 | Horror, Thriller, and Mystery | 182 pages | First published December 12, 2022
Rating: ★★★★☆

Jack Steen’s Merry with All That Murder takes the comforting ingredients of Christmas fiction—cookies, candy canes, familiar songs, and holiday traditions—and contaminates them with blood, revenge, and deathbed testimony. The sixth installment in The Asylum Confession Files is a compact anthology of five confessions from violent patients spending their final hours in an asylum’s death ward.

The book retains the series’ grimly effective premise. Jack Steen, the narrator and night nurse, cares for patients who are expected to die before leaving his ward. Many are serial killers, mass murderers, and other dangerous criminals. In exchange for easing their deaths, he asks them to provide the complete versions of their crimes: not the sanitized statements, official accounts, or carefully constructed lies they may have given before, but the secrets they have never shared with anyone else.

Whether these confessions are truthful is another question. Steen knows his patients are skilled manipulators, and the uncertainty surrounding their testimony is part of the series’ appeal. Each confession becomes both a horror story and a final contest between the person speaking and the man listening.

In this volume, the formula receives a macabre Christmas makeover. The resulting collection is playful, disturbing, intentionally tasteless, and unlikely to appear on anyone’s list of heartwarming seasonal reads.

Christmas Through the Asylum Looking Glass

Holiday horror works by corrupting images associated with comfort and safety. Snow-covered homes become isolated traps. Gifts conceal danger. Family gatherings expose old resentments. Festive songs become ominous through repetition. Cookies—symbols of childhood, generosity, and domestic warmth—become accessories to murder.

Steen embraces that contrast enthusiastically. The stories revolve around five patients—Clyde, Penny, Andrea, Birdie Bleu, and Becca—whose confessions connect violence with familiar holiday treats. Sugar cookies, thumbprint cookies, gingerbread, candy cane shortbread, and the pointed absence of cookies all become part of the volume’s sinister personality.

The cookie motif gives the collection cohesion without making every confession feel identical. Food can convey affection, memory, control, ritual, or revenge, and Steen exploits those associations for grotesque effect. A plate of Christmas cookies no longer represents simple hospitality; it may reveal something about the killer, the victim, or the twisted relationship between them.

This approach creates the book’s defining tone. Merry with All That Murder is not solemn literary horror, nor does it attempt to treat Christmas as sacred. It is closer to a blood-spattered box of holiday chocolates: compact, varied, and designed to deliver one wicked surprise after another.

Five Patients, Five Disturbing Confessions

The collection contains five deathbed confessions, each framed through Steen’s work on the ward.

Patient Clyde enjoys eating sugar cookies while watching a victim die. The combination immediately establishes the book’s method: an ordinary pleasure sits beside an appalling act, making both seem stranger. Clyde’s habit transforms passive observation into ritual. The cookie is not merely a snack but part of how he experiences power and death.

Patient Penny takes the imagery further by replacing the jam in thumbprint cookies with blood. This is perhaps the volume’s most direct fusion of holiday baking and body horror. Thumbprint cookies already possess a suggestive visual quality, and Steen turns that familiarity into something repulsive.

Patient Andrea’s connection to gingerbread is tied to revenge. Gingerbread carries strong associations with family traditions, decorated houses, childhood stories, and carefully shaped figures. Placing it within a confession about vengeance allows those associations to be inverted. The sweetness becomes a surface covering something bitter and destructive.

Birdie Bleu receives candy cane shortbread cookies after everything she has endured. Even the description of her segment suggests a more complicated relationship between guilt, victimhood, sympathy, and violence. The series’ confessional format is particularly effective when it unsettles the reader’s instinct to divide everyone into simple categories. A person can suffer terribly and still become dangerous; understanding someone’s pain does not automatically absolve what they later choose to do.

Finally, Becca receives no cookies and nearly does not appear in the book at all. That exclusion makes her confession feel like an outlier even before it begins. In a collection organized around killers and baked goods, denying one patient the recurring symbol becomes a dark joke as well as a warning that her story may resist the pattern established by the others.

The stories are connected thematically rather than through a single conventional plot. This makes the book easy to read in short sessions, although its brisk pacing may tempt horror fans to consume the entire collection at once.

Jack Steen and the Morality of the Bargain

The confessions are the immediate attraction, but the recurring narrator provides the series with its moral tension. Steen is not simply recording patients’ statements. He offers a bargain: tell him the truth, and he will help make the patient’s death less painful.

That arrangement raises uncomfortable questions. Is Steen providing mercy, administering justice, satisfying his curiosity, or exercising power over helpless people? Can meaningful consent exist when one participant is dying and dependent on the other for relief? Does the value of a confession change when it is obtained under such conditions?

The patients’ crimes prevent these questions from producing easy sympathy. These are not harmless people unfairly trapped in a cruel institution. Yet their guilt does not automatically make every action taken against them morally uncomplicated. The narrator’s willingness to occupy that gray territory is one reason the premise remains interesting across multiple installments.

Steen is also aware that the information he receives may be unreliable. Serial offenders often manipulate audiences, reconstruct memories, minimize responsibility, or turn their crimes into performances. A final confession may be sincere, but it may just as easily be one last opportunity to control another person.

This uncertainty gives the stories an additional layer. Readers are not merely learning what happened; they are listening to someone decide how the events will be remembered. The confessor may be seeking absolution, recognition, revenge, or the satisfaction of planting one final horror in the nurse’s mind.

A Tone Balanced Between Horror and Black Comedy

The book’s voice is irreverent, conversational, and knowingly excessive. Steen does not present the collection as restrained psychological realism. The language invites readers to recognize the absurdity of combining Christmas cheer with serial murder while still engaging with the ugliness of the confessions.

That blackly comic attitude will be a major strength for some readers and a limitation for others. Anyone who enjoys horror with a pulpy, mischievous streak will likely appreciate the book’s willingness to be outrageous. The contrast between cozy baking and violent death creates a tone reminiscent of an especially gruesome holiday special.

Readers seeking subtle dread, complex prose, or deeply realistic criminal psychology may find the stories too sensational. The characters and scenarios are built for immediate impact, and the short-confession format favors sharp hooks, disturbing revelations, and memorable images over extensive development.

The humor does not make the content gentle. The book includes profanity and potentially triggering material involving murder, sexual violence, abuse, and other forms of cruelty. Its playful packaging should not be mistaken for a lighthearted treatment of harmless subjects. The jokes and holiday decorations sit around the violence rather than replacing it.

The Strength of the Anthology Format

At 182 pages, Merry with All That Murder moves quickly. Five confessions provide enough variety to sustain the premise without making the Christmas theme feel exhausted. Each patient introduces a different voice, crime, and emotional atmosphere, while the asylum setting and Steen’s presence keep the pieces connected.

The format is especially suitable for horror because short fiction does not always need to explain every mystery. A confession can end with an unresolved implication, a questionable claim, or a final revelation that leaves the reader to imagine what happened beyond the page. The limited space also mirrors the urgency of the setting: these patients are running out of time.

However, brevity has predictable costs. Readers who become interested in a particular patient may want more psychological depth, background, or aftermath than the story provides. The most intriguing confessions could potentially support longer narratives of their own.

The structure may also begin to feel familiar to readers who have consumed several previous volumes. A patient arrives, Steen negotiates for the truth, and the confession unfolds. The Christmas concept helps refresh that formula, but it does not fundamentally reinvent it.

Recipes After Ruin

One of the book’s strangest—and most memorable—features is the inclusion of cookie recipes associated with the confessions. Steen also includes an anti-Christmas playlist, extending the theme beyond the stories themselves.

The recipes intensify the book’s clash between domestic comfort and violent fantasy. After reading about a killer’s connection to a particular cookie, readers are invited to bake that same variety at home. It is simultaneously charming, ridiculous, and unsettling.

These extras give the book the personality of a deliberately corrupted Christmas gift. They also show that Steen understands the entertainment value of his concept. The volume is not pretending to be only a grave meditation on criminality. It is a themed horror experience meant to accompany a particular season.

Some readers may find the transition from murder confession to baking instruction jarring or even tasteless. That reaction is understandable, but the tonal collision is clearly intentional. The recipes are not unrelated bonus material; they complete the collection’s central joke.

What the Book Does Well

The greatest strength of Merry with All That Murder is its commitment to its premise. Steen does not use Christmas merely as background decoration. Holiday foods and traditions are integrated into the identities of the patients and the presentation of their confessions.

The recurring narrator also gives the collection more unity than an ordinary anthology. Steen’s bargain with the dying patients creates a reliable framework, while his uncertainty about their honesty prevents him from becoming a simple dispenser of justice.

The book is also accessible. Its short length, direct prose, episodic structure, and sensational hooks make it suitable for readers who want a fast horror experience rather than a slow, demanding novel. The five-story format allows each confession to reach its central horror without extensive detours.

Finally, the combination of stories, recipes, and music gives the volume a distinct identity. Many Christmas horror books offer seasonal murder; fewer invite the reader to prepare themed cookies afterward.

Where It May Divide Readers

The subject matter is deliberately extreme. Violence and cruelty are central to the series, and this installment adds comic holiday imagery rather than softening any of it. Readers sensitive to descriptions of murder, abuse, or sexual violence should take the warning seriously.

The tonal mixture may also prove divisive. Black comedy requires readers to accept rapid movement between suffering and absurdity. Those who prefer horror to maintain a consistently serious emotional register may find the cookie jokes and festive wordplay distracting.

Similarly, the confessional setup requires a tolerance for potentially unreliable narrators. Readers hoping for clear factual resolutions may be frustrated by the possibility that some patients are still lying. For others, that uncertainty is precisely what makes the stories compelling.

This is also not an ideal entry point for readers who dislike anthology-style storytelling. Although the asylum framework connects the confessions, the book is composed of separate narratives rather than one continuously developing mystery.

Who Should Read It?

Merry with All That Murder is best suited to:

• Fans of short-form horror and crime fiction
• Readers already following The Asylum Confession Files
• Those who enjoy unreliable narrators and deathbed secrets
• Admirers of holiday horror with dark comedy
• Readers looking for a fast, gruesome seasonal book
• Anyone amused by the idea of pairing serial-killer confessions with cookie recipes

It is less suitable for readers seeking a comforting Christmas mystery, a realistic procedural, or a restrained psychological thriller. Despite the baked goods and holiday packaging, this is emphatically not cozy fiction.

Final Assessment

Merry with All That Murder is a gleefully warped addition to Jack Steen’s Asylum Confession Files. Its five deathbed confessions transform holiday cookies into symbols of ritual, revenge, manipulation, and death, while the asylum setting keeps the collection grounded in the series’ unsettling central bargain.

The stories are brief, graphic, and designed for impact. They may not offer the depth of a full-length psychological novel, but they compensate with variety, momentum, and a sharply defined seasonal personality. Steen’s mixture of horror and black comedy gives the book the feeling of a Christmas celebration organized by someone who should never have been trusted with the decorations—or the oven.

Its recipes and anti-Christmas playlist complete the experience, turning the book into an unusually interactive piece of holiday horror. Readers can move from fictional atrocities to real baking instructions, although thumbprint cookies may never look quite as innocent again.

With its strong reader rating and clear popularity within the series, Merry with All That Murder appears to deliver what its audience expects: disturbing confessions, manipulative killers, moral ambiguity, and a narrator willing to listen until the bitter end. It is a quick, bloody alternative to conventional Christmas reading—best enjoyed by readers who prefer their holiday cheer served with a body count.