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Ring the Bells: (The Stranger Times 5)
Paperback
Series: Stranger Times
Publisher Price: $18.99
ISBN13: 9781804993378
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: Nov 24 2026
Pages: 400
Weight: 0.81
Language: English
'Fiendishly clever and monstrously funny, C. K. McDonnell's latest will steal your soul and eat your brain. In the nicest possible way, of course.' -- Tom Holt, author of The Portable Door and The Eight Reindeers of Christmas
It is beginning to look a lot like Christmas...
For most people, that means celebration, relaxation, and a little festive excess. But not for the staff of The Stranger Times.
A book club meeting ending in a triple murder isn't unprecedented--but it is certainly noteworthy. It soon becomes clear that this is no ordinary book-club-triple-murder. A librarian has been possessed by a chaotic entity that has broken through from another dimension, hellbent on vengeance. He's made a list--and unlike Santa, he isn't checking it twice. In fact, the whole of humanity is on it.
Who would summon such a terrifying force? And more importantly, how can anyone send it back?
As if that weren't enough, a shocking revelation about one member of The Stranger Times team brings family together--but not in a way that's ever going to make it into a Hallmark movie.
Featuring demonically possessed Santas, bloodthirsty books, and the ghost of a legendary nightclub, Ring the Bells is a gloriously chaotic festive adventure in which Christmas may well end in apocalypse.
The fifth installment in the award-winning, critically acclaimed, and laugh-out-loud funny The Stranger Times series, Ring the Bells delivers another irresistible blend of horror, fantasy, mystery, and razor-sharp comedy.
Praise for Relight My Fire
McDonnell's world is transgressively hilarious, grimly banal and beguilingly warm. Of course there's a story that the intrepid journalists of The Stranger Times have to tease out--grave-robbing, cryogenics, a very angry witch, and a washed-up indie legend looking for a lost album--but the real joy lies in the pitfalls and pratfalls of getting there.
-- Daily Mail
An absolute riot of a read.
-- Daily Express
Laugh-out-loud funny and full of colorful characters.
-- Daily Mirror
It's no secret that here at SciFi Towers we're massive fans of the Stranger Times series by C. K. McDonnell.
-- SciFiNow
I loved the dry and embedded humor of this book--it's the stuff of life... the whole thing is great fun.
-- SFCrowsnest
Relight My Fire is perhaps the best since the original.*
-- Starburst
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