I’m back with capsule reviews of the ongoing “advent calendar” of stories published this season by WMG Publishing, as edited by writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, this writing project delivers a short holiday story to your email inbox each day from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, 40 stories in all.

I write a lot of short stories, so this one feels like a natural buy for me. But as I watched it come together—from the initial Kickstarter, to the test emails, to the final product—I’m frankly amazed how the editor makes it all seem so seamless. If you’re not a writer, you probably don’t think about such things.

The prevailing thought in traditional publishing is that short stories are not nearly as desirable as full-blown novels, so when big publishers think about fiction, that’s where their heads go. But lots of people like short stories because they’re…uh, short. (Amazon is making bank selling very short fiction and nonfiction audiobooks to their audience because of this.) Another publisher rule goes something like, Don’t mix genres. The assumption is that if someone only reads romance that they won’t ever want to read mystery or sci-fi or fantasy. This project breaks that rule too.

It will pay off well down the road. When Rusch’s Spectacular is done, she’ll have 40 different stories by lots of authors. She will bundle all the stories together into a giant ebook edition, which will get sent to everyone who subscribed. (Here’s an affiliate link to the first collection that was done in Year 1.)

It’s in ebook format because you could never print a 40-story collection in one volume. It would break your foot if you dropped it.

After the giant ebook, she’ll repackage those stories a second time as themed anthologies. All the romance stories go in one paper edition, say. The crime stories go in another. And so on. I’ve bought those in the past too, mostly because I like the covers (and because I like researching and studying what other writers do).

Up above I’ve posted a pic of the six anthologies I have on my Christmas shelf right now. A total of 12 have been published thus far. (Here’s an affiliate link to the previously published anthologies.)

I’m actually doing pretty well reading the stories the day they come in, or during the night if I can’t sleep. And when I finish them, I move onto another batch of Christmas shorts, either by Rusch or by the brilliant Connie Willis, best known as a SFF writer. (I’ll talk about those books and shorts next time.)

That’s enough chit-chat. Let’s get into the reviews. If you think you might be interested in subscribing to this project next year, get on the WMG Holiday Spectacular mailing list. You can check out swag at that website too.

The second 10 stories were:

• “Judgment Ink,” by DeAnna Knippling. A stranger with a secret walks in a tattoo parlor on a stormy winter’s night, offering $10,000 to any artist who will ink an elaborate tattoo on his back tonight. From there, it descends into a powerful, dark crime story that kept me riveted until the inevitable conclusion. Really superb. In her intro, Rusch said the story contained a touch of magic, but I don’t agree. The magic was all in the prose.

• “The Baking Challenge,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Rafael works in the restaurant industry in Manhattan but dreams of attending culinary school to perfect his love of baking. When not working, he bakes up a storm in his minuscule apartment in the Heights, then foists his creations off on his neighbors in the building. They love his food—except for one woman, the cute law student who is “allergic to everything.” The stage is set: Can he whip up some wonderful delicacies that will tempt her, without ruining her health? Rusch appears to know baking very well, because she’s referenced it in other stories. This is a very sweet romance that does not follow the usual heartthrob beats, but gets there just the same. Reminded me a lot of my own days taking cooking classes, cooking in a crappy Hoboken apartment, and dreaming of the future.

• “Only in My Dreams,” by Lisa S. Silverthorne. A WWII story slotted to roughly coincide with Pearl Harbor Day, December 7. Henry is a young American pilot shot down over Berlin who ends up a POW in a German stalag. He dreams of making it home to Nebraska for Christmas. Will he, won’t he? The writing here is impressionistic, with sentence fragments that paint a bleak picture of life in a prison camp. A deeply emotional conclusion that left me near tears.

• “Promises Under Trees,” by Ron Collins. On one hand, this is a Cold War espionage story. On the other it’s the story of an old man recalling the relationship he had with his brilliant sister, and the Christmas they once shared. I’ve heard of this writer before, and have even visited his website, but had never read any of his work. I was mostly blown away by the powerful prose, especially in the opening descriptions of nature, and the tree under which the two kids make their pact to each other.

• “Katia and the King Rat,” by Michèle Laframboise. In the late 1960s, a Russian ballerina attempts to defect from the USSR while performing The Nutcracker in Oslo. The story is bleak, dark, cold—but, like many shared in this project, ultimately uplifting. Left me in tears.

• “Season for Treason,” by Kelly Washington. A powerful, claustrophobic story about a military security officer investigating a break-in at a nuclear facility in the snowbound upper reaches of the continental US in the early hours of Christmas day. This was the fourth military story we’ve had in as many days, and I didn’t think I’d want to deal with it. But it was a tightly focused mystery, with genuine clues, and sucked me right in.

• “A Dreidel Ball Miracle,” by Johanna Rohtman. Our first Hanukkah story. Two computer geeks who run the silent auction at a Dreidel ball have to deal with a computer hack—and fall in love—all in the same crazy night. This sweet romance story flew! Granted, it skipped some of the typical romance beats, but it had to, because was only a mere 2,000 words.

• “The Last Multivariable Differential Christmas,” by Michael Warren Lucas. Holy smokes, what a great story. It’s set on a college campus close to December exam time. Our protagonist is a brilliant but tortured grad student in mathematics who everyone seeks out to solve their problems. This time, it’s a nursing student who knows four of her classmates are have been cheating all semester. She can’t rat them out because she’ll be tainted by the same brush. Can our hero shut down the transgressors in time? Of course he can; he’s a freaking genius, and one of the most memorable characters I’ve encountered in a long time. I’m probably going to go back and re-read Lucas’s story in last year’s Spectacular, as well as the ones going back further in time. He’s got a really well-honed gift for voice.

• “Only Here for the Food,” by Patricia Duffy Novak. This is what I’d consider a “dark” romance story. The protagonist is a young scholarship student who works two jobs on campus and scrounges for food at free church buffets and frat parties just to feed herself. She becomes embroiled in an incident at one of those frats, and falls for the cop. The romance beats worked fine, but I was stunned by a twist at the end that might well threaten their future happiness.

• “Santa by Any Other Name,” by Bonnie Elizabeth. Rusch tells us in her email intro that this is the grimmest story she’ll share with us this season. And it is grim. A woman is summoned to the bedside of her dying father, a man she knew as a monster early in her childhood and whom she has grown up hating for beating her and her mother. But on the shortest day of the year, she has to decide if it’s time to let that easy characterization go, after learning facts about him that might just change the story. A pretty powerful story that also changed the way I look at this whole project. More on that next time.

That’s a peek at the second batch of 10 stories. Wow—we are twenty days from Thanksgiving at this point, and half way to the New Year. More reviews in 10 days.

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

See Part III of this series, with my review of the third batch of 10 stories.

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