The Strange Visitation

"I exhort therefore, that intercessions be made for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty." - 1 Timothy 2

This verse is the center of this fascinating, rip-roaring, family friendly, deeply Christian tale. A terrifying spin on Dickens' A Christmas Carol commissioned for the 1904 Special Christmas Issue of The Strand, it tells of Josiah McNason, “A case of a man gone wrong! A case of a human creature who has a stone in the place where his heart ought to be!—a hard, heavy stone, without a pulse of love or kindness in it! Sir Slasher believes it’s cancer. But if it is, they’ll never find it, McNason! No!—your cancer’s on the mind!”

The goblin who announces this takes him on a terrifying voyage, in which he sees his fate as a goblin, watches a goblin preacher exhorting his congregation of fallen souls, travels to the bedside of a dying man he has refused to save, watches an atheist preacher spinning a newfangled 'faith' that ignores Christ's presence in the heart of Westminster Abbey, and faces the horrors of a fate that cares as little for him as he does for his fellow man.

Paranormal and gothic, Christian and anti-church, fun and thoughtful, filled with hideous darkness and angelic light, this book is perfect for anyone looking for victorian-era penny dreadful drama and adventure with a solidly Christian spin.

Corelli outsold AC Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Kipling combined. Critics hated her, calling her "the favourite of the common multitude", and she hated them in return. A favourite of Churchill, Queen Victoria and Gladstone, her friends included Mark Twain, Ouida, the Empress Frederick of Germany, and Tennyson. She was described as "a woman of deplorable talent who imagined that she was a genius, and was accepted as a genius by a public to whose commonplace sentimentalities and prejudices she gave a glamorous setting.