Here are my thoughts on the last batch of 10 stories of the 2023 “advent calendar” of stories published by WMG Publishing, as edited by writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Just to remind you: this writing project delivered a short holiday story to subscribers’ email inboxes each day from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, 40 stories in all. My goal was to read every one as soon as possible after they came in, and review them quickly.

Frankly, I’m surprised those 40 days went by so quickly. The holidays are indeed a blur.

Let me finish the stories, then give you my wrap-up thoughts.

• “The Forest of Christmas Trees,” by Steven Mohan, Jr. As soon as I read the first paragraph, I knew this was going to be a hilarious story. I did not expect it to be an emotional one, too. The author creates a situation where we find ourselves rooting for two characters to fall in love, when we know they are not made for each other. In fact, they’re the most unlikely couple ever. She’s a tree-hugging hermit. He’s a fatuous, entitled billionaire. But it was funny as hell, and worked.

• “The Room Where it Happened,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. This story landed in my in-box Christmas Day. And the last thing you want to do that day is find time to read a 15,000-word story—but I did, and loved it. It’s slow-burn romance about a woman who loves live theater, but can never find the right person to take advantage of her season tickets with her. It reminded me of the one or two years in NYC when I had tickets to the opera. This sweet piece wrapped with love, and the appearance of a Christmas ghost. A lot of heart and depth to keep me glued till the last page.

• “Boxing Day Kintsugi,” by Brenda Carre. This one grew on me. The conceit is a Christmas story told through the third-person POV of a little boy named Joey. He mangles words and doesn’t quite follow what’s really going on around him, but we do. Or least I did by the end, once I understood the voice. Very sweet, indeed.

• “The Final Instruction,” by Kate Rohan. A cozy mystery set in the UK. A professor has gone missing in a forest during a Boxing Day treasure hunt, and the cops call in a consultant to lend her expertise to the problem. It’s a clever, murderless mystery that I utterly enjoyed, despite my early misgivings. For one, I was astonished that it took us a quarter of the story for the plot to move beyond what I’ve just told you. But as I’ve learned in this exercise, many of these stories take that long to ramp up. I obsess over how many pages I have to read, then by the end, I have been sucked in so completely that great chunks of the story fly by. Rohan’s work was a revelation. She has two Christmas collections that I now plan to buy.

• “The Snowmaiden and the Major of the Military Police,” by Henry Martin. A hard-boiled mystery set in Ukraine during the current miserable conflict. When I went into this story, I wasn’t sure I’d be interested, knowing that the author writes technothrillers, which I don’t read. And since I’ve been on a news fast for months to avoid bad news, I wasn’t sure I wanted to read fiction in a miserable war environment. (I know what you’re thinking: “What the hell does this guy want to read?" I’ll answer that later…) Suffice to say, this one sucked me in too. It only works because a) the details of the life of the Russian MP feel incredibly believable, and b) we buy that he’s a moral enough man to care about cracking the case. The Christmas connection is slight, but consistent. Our hero is constantly thinking of the Winter Festival, Russia’s version of a secular Christmas festivity. Great details and writing.

• “Catherine the Great,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Awesome story. At first glance, you would not think that the story of a Vegas-born defense attorney returning to her hometown to defend an asshole football player who assaulted a woman in an elevator could possibly end victoriously. Nor could you imagine what anything like this has to do with the Christmas holidays. But it works. It’s not a story I would re-read for fun, but it’s awesome.

• “Holiday Company,” by Dean Wesley Smith. This is part of Smith’s long-running time-travel western series. I’ve read them before and they’re always fun. This was exceedingly brief, but packed a punch. Nailed, in other words, a specific feeling. A 2024 scientist keeps time-traveling back to 1910 Idaho, determined to hibernate through winter in a pioneer cabin. Every time he’s tried this in the past, he’s died and returned to 2024. This time, he succeeds! Why he does is the real reason for the season, baby!

• “Light in the Dark Times,” by T. Thorn Coyle. A story by this author earlier in the season brought me to tears. This one, billed as a mystery romance, did not. It was terribly bleak, trying to marry the beats of a serial killer crime investigation with the beats of a queer romance. The romance worked, but the two genres did not mesh well for me at all.

• “The End of a Long Ride,” by Dean Wesley Smith. This is one of Smith’s long-running Marble Grant series, about a female ghost who works the Vegas strip trying to help the living. I’ve enjoyed them in the past, and they always kept me guessing. This one, about the bizarre return of Lady Godiva to modern-day Vegas on New Year’s Day, just wasn’t to my taste.

That’s a peek at the last batch of 10 stories.

Some wrap-up thoughts:

• In general, I’d say that I’m like most readers. If I come to a story, I try to assess in the first couple of paragraphs if I really want to read it or not. If I’m not challenging myself, the answer is typically no. I have enough that I want to read, enough that is waiting in the wings for my attention—why buy more to read? Why read what I’ve already paid for, but don’t like in the moment? Because this was a challenge, I pushed myself beyond that knee-jerk reaction, and found that I really loved a lot of these stories. So much so that….

• I am now determined to write some holiday stories of my own. In this household, many of our books are keyed to major American holidays (Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas) but none of my short fiction has touched the subject. That’s a shame. I’d like to rectify that this year.

• I am not sure I’ll want to get the next Holiday Spectacular in a daily delivery format. This is a busy time of year for us typically. With cooking and guests and the spontaneity of shopping and errands, I find I have less time to read with book in hand. This is, however, a time that is better suited to listening to audiobooks. I’ll continue buying the Holiday Spectacular anthologies when they are released. As I said in my Part III wrap-up, I have more than 30 Christmas titles on my ereader device that I’d like to get to in 2024. I will probably finish the Connie Willis collection in January, then cool it on Christmas fare until I get the itch again. But I’m fine if that’s not until Black Friday 2024.

That’s it for me on his project. The holidays are over, and I’m really looking forward to moving on to other books and reading. (I’ll share more about that next week.) That said, I do recommend you check out the 2024 Holiday Spectacular Kickstarter when it pops up this year.

Thanks for reading.

See Part I of this series, with my review of the first 10 stories.

See Part II of this series, with my review of the second batch of 10 stories.

See Part III of this series, with my reviews of the final 10 stories.