Grandma gives a sweater she knitted, Dad receives a necktie he doesn’t really like, the kids get toys that make a variety of noises, most of them loud, all of them annoying.
What do writers give for the holiday season? They give the gift of stories that take the reader away to fantastical times or places, tales that can be blood-curdling or heart-warming, adventures that capture the heart of the season.
Fantastic Holiday Stories by Kevin J. Anderson • Kristine Kathryn Rusch • Rebecca Moesta • David Farland • Larry Correia • Nina Kiriki Hoffman • Dean Wesley Smith • Debra Gray De Noux & O’Neil De Noux • Jerry Oltion • Kathy Oltion • Kent Patterson • Ray Vukcevich • Kim Antieau.
Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. finds himself tackling a bizarre Christmas case when Santa Claus himself becomes a client, hiring Dan to recover some very precious stolen North Pole property. If you like werewolves, vampires, evil elves, zombies, as well as a lot of belly laughs, curl up with this story and some eggnog.
In pursuit of a scoop, American journalist Hal Garson follows up on a mysterious, desperate letter that points to the whereabouts of legendary author Antone Luac, who vanished without a trace in Mexico years ago. The celebrated writer's disappearance is an enduring mystery, and Garson senses this story will make his career. Despite warnings, he travels to isolated Ciudad Brockman and begins asking questions . . . too many questions, which place him in the crossfire of a local crime lord, a Communist insurgent group, and finally to the imprisoned writer—and his beautiful daughter—who may not want to be found.
Immortal aliens have observed Earth for centuries, making full sensory movies of wars, natural disasters, and horrific human activities… all to relieve their boredom. When they finally became jaded by ordinary, run-of-the-mill tragedies, they found ways to create their own disasters, just to amuse themselves. However, interfering with human activities was forbidden, and by the time Investigator Kelexel arrived to investigate, things were really getting out of hand…
Lori Vale, a rebellious teenager, is thrust into the middle of a violent religious conflict when her mother is murdered, and the girl is taken to a heavily guarded fortress in an ancient Greek monastery. There, a group of radical women is creating an earthshaking religious text, the Holy Women’s Bible. The new sacred book will include the Old Testament and the New Testament, edited to alter gospels that are detrimental to the interests of women, such as passages asserting that they should obey their husbands, remain silent in churches, and suffer the burden of Eve’s sins.
A third section of the Holy Women’s Bible is the biggest bombshell, the Testament of the She-Apostles. It asserts that Jesus Christ had 24 apostles, not 12, and half were women called “she-apostles.” Eleven she-apostles have been reincarnated in modern times as female children, and are revealing new female-oriented gospels about the life of Jesus, stories they say were omitted from the Bible by male church authorities who decided what to include in the Bible and what to leave out of it, in order to assert the power and dominance of men over women.
The radical women have dangerous enemies, and Lori’s life is in grave peril, along with the lives of the remarkable female apostles of Jesus. . . .
Long ago, the ancient gospels of Jesus's female apostles were stolen by powerful churchmen and relegated to the rubbish heaps of history. But those apostles have been reborn as female children, and are dictating new gospels that will be incorporated into a radical new religious text, the Holy Women's Bible.
At a hidden women's fortress in Greece, the teenager Lori Vale develops a paranormal relationship with one of the reincarnated children, and soon begins to suspect that she may have been connected to the female apostles of Jesus in ancient times, when the Son of God walked the earth and preached to the people of the Holy Land.
While information about Lori's past is unfolding, she finds herself caught in a violent religious conflict that has immense historical repercussions. Powerful, brutal men want to suppress the emerging gospels of the she-apostles, men who are hell-bent on destroying the radical women and their heretical texts. The women race to get their material completed and published before they are annihilated, but they have another big problem: the twelfth she-apostle--Martha of Galilee--has not been found yet, and the other female apostles say she holds a dark secret that could do enormous damage to the cause of women, and to the entire planet. . . .
