Gathering four stories from four bestselling author friends, Invitation is the first collection in the ongoing Harbingers series.
In The Call by Bill Myers, four strangers are drawn together to help a student at the mysterious Institute for Advanced Psychic Studies. His gifts are supposedly being honed to assist world leaders . . . but there are some very disturbing strings attached. Frank Peretti’s The Haunted confronts a supernatural mystery, a case of murder, and an exploration into the darkness of the human heart, all centering around a mysterious house.
In Angela Hunt’s The Sentinels, animals around the world are mysteriously dying. What could it mean? When the tragedy begins to touch Andi’s dreams, she discovers a terrifying theory. The Girl by Alton Gansky is a gripping tale of a young barefoot girl found holding a scroll in the snowy Oregon mountains. She is sweet, innocent–apparently not of this world — and something wants to kill her.
Bill Myers is an American Christian author, film director and film producer. He was born in Seattle, Washington on September 9, 1953.
Myers is most notable for the animated series The Adventures of McGee and Me. He is an author of books from many genres, including comedy, horror, thriller, fiction, and non-fiction. He has written over 80 books.
Frank Peretti is a New York Times best-selling author of Christian fiction, whose novels primarily focus on the supernatural. To date, his works have sold over 15 million copies worldwide. Peretti is best known for his novels This Present Darkness (1986) and Piercing the Darkness (1989). Peretti has held ministry credentials with the Assemblies of God, and formerly played the banjo in a bluegrass band called Northern Cross. He now lives in Coeur d’Alene Idaho with his wife, Barbara.
Angela Elwell Hunt is a prolific Christian author, and her books include The Tale of Three Trees, The Debt, The Note, and The Nativity Story, among others.
Alton Gansky is an American novelist in the Christian fiction genre. He has written 6 non-fiction books and 23 novels, three of which were co-authored with former Army Ranger Jeff Struecker. In 2012 Gansky and Struecker’s Fallen Angel was honored as the American Christian Fiction Writers’ “top thriller” of that year.
My Impressions:
I didn’t really know what to expect when I chose Invitation to read and review. Oh, I knew that the 4-novella collection was authored by some of the best authors in the field of Christian fiction, and that I have never been disappointed by anything they have written. I also knew that their writing style, characterization, and plot-development suited my reading tastes. But I didn’t know I would be led on a challenging and twisting journey that included mind-bending situations. Invitation is speculative fiction at its best. It has a unique format that suits the genre well — short, episodic novellas, changing points of view, and story lines which at first seem unrelated, but soon come together in a coherent manner. There is something weird going on, and this reader enjoyed every minute.
Each novella in the collection has a different author and the unique voice of one of the four main characters. Four very different people with strange gifts are brought together in what can only be called a supernatural way. And try as they might, they cannot keep from forming a team to investigate and somehow impact weird happenings. I loved how the authors’ collaboration brought forth a cohesive whole. This cannot possibly be easy to achieve, but they somehow managed to achieve unique stories within a consistent framework.
Evil seems to be having its way in Invitation, but there is a sense that God is at work in big ways in the world and in the lives of the main characters. I think the spiritual journey each character embarks on is my favorite part. As each challenge is met, the characters learn more about themselves and their place within a spiritual world. Each novella is wrapped up in Invitation, but the story is far from over. Invitation is just the first novella collection in this series.
Invitation is gritty and edgy; not your typical CF. So don’t be surprised if this book takes you places you didn’t expect with characters that don’t often show up in normal novels. You just need to do what I did — sit back and let the authors take you on a trip you won’t forget.
Recommended for fans of speculative fiction.
Audience: adults.
To purchase, click HERE.
(Thanks to Bethany House for a complimentary copy. All opinions expressed are mine alone.)
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