Ring the Bells

The new adventure in the brilliantly funny The Stranger Times series sees the team confronting perils both frightening... and festive!

A demonic elder god has returned to our world and is ready to wreak death and destruction. But this deity needs believers and to find those, he takes possession of a second-rate 'Christmas experience' Santa Claus to harness the belief of children... because only children really believe in anything anymore.

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 a time of celebration, relaxation, and inebriation, but not for the staff of The Stranger Times. While a book club meeting ending in a triple murder isn't unprecedented, it is at least noteworthy. It quickly emerges that this is no ordinary book-club-triple-murder either, as it features a librarian possessed by a chaotic entity from another dimension, hellbent on vengeance. He's made a list, but he's not checking it twice as the whole of humanity is on it. Who would want to summon such a thing? And how is anyone going to be able to send it back?

As if that wasn't enough to deal with, a shocking revelation about a member of The Stranger Times team's past brings family together, but not in a way that's ever going to make it into a Hallmark movie.

Featuring demonically possessed Santas, blood-thirsty books, and the ghost of a legendary nightclub, it's beginning to look a lot like a Christmas apocalypse...

Ring the Bells is the fifth book in the award-winning, critically acclaimed, and laugh-out-loud funny The Stranger Times series.

The reviewers loved 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 colourful 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 humour of this book, it's the stuff of life... the whole thing is great fun. – SFCROSWNEST

Relight My Fire is perhaps the best since the original. – STARBURST