Transworld Publishers Ltd Ring the Bells (3, 2025) | C. K. McDonnell

‘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 who has broken through from another dimension and is 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 be dealing 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