3 stars

I think I may have enjoyed this book more knowing what I was getting myself into before starting to read it. So here are some helpful hints about what you’ll find inside this book:

1. The term “paranormal” in the title refers mostly to “paranormal romance”, which I am not a huge fan of. While the stories weren’t erotic, most of them center around a romantic relationship or incorporate romantic elements, which I usually don’t enjoy reading.

2. By “paranormal”, the title also means mostly werewolves/wolf shifters. Again, not all of the stories rely on this, but over half of them have wolf characters. This in itself isn’t a problem, but I was expecting more diversity going into it.

3. By “stories”, the title really means “prequels” or otherwise part of an existing series. This is what irked me the most, because in general, unless I have read a book in the series, I don’t really enjoy prequels. So only having read one of the series whose prequel was included, it just felt like people trying to advertise their paranormal series (which I completely understand, but doesn’t really make for great stories in my opinion). This may have been fine if I knew about it in advance, but I was really let down by how few stand alone stories there were.

Having said all of that, this book was not bad in itself. It had a few very good stories it in. I averaged all of my ratings for each story and got 2.5 stars, but bumped it up solely for “Simon Says” by Rachel McClellan. This was by far my favorite in the book. It was the perfect balance of creepy and intriguing. I highly recommend that story. If nothing else, get the book for that story. It is definitely worth it if you’re a fan of the unsettling.

I also enjoyed “Potatoes and Gravy” by Aimee Easterling and “Miami Twist” by A. Blythe.

On the whole, the stories were well-written. There were really only one or two that I really did not like, not because there were poorly written; mostly just because they did not appeal to me plot-wise. There were definitely some interesting twists on the holiday theme and you can expect appearances from some well known Christmas-time characters.