Peter Schnake: 8 books

University student, Josiah Greene, has a secret. He’s a musical savant poised for greatness from a young age. Growing up under an abusive father and exploitive mother he developed self-injurious practices to repress his music. Finally free to make his own decisions, he obsessively seeks affection...

In this short story, Christie, a relapsed alcoholic, faces her first Christmas apart from her children. As she window-shops for gifts her ex-husband won’t allow her to give, she finds a family huddled around a fire in the alley behind the store. If she wants to offer help, she must face her own fractured heart.

Braving a cold night in Myra to give his gifts in secret, Our Bishop encounters a child who seems intent on stopping him. But is that the child's true intent, or is he offering a chance to give more than mere fruit?

Brothers Mark and Orin make a habit of attending Gatherings. This one begins like all the others. The healer claims unnatural powers and uses poor Latin. But there has never before been a snake-bearer. As the ceremony begins and the role of the snake-bearer becomes clear, Mark is scandalized. The...

Titus’ life as a stay-at-home dad is disrupted when his husband, Lucas, loses his job. He re-enters the workforce as a stockboy at Glenn’s Value Plus, where an encounter with a woman stealing tunafood and a coworker vowing to get him fired cause him to wish he lived on Mars. The X-Tellus company...

In this final transcript from the "Helianthus," First Lieutenant Hyland Rivera confronts his own desire to take the vessel on a collision course with the sun, because as he says, “God told him to.” Torn between his love for Captain Zephaniah Cass, “the only other man in the universe” and his...

Decades after Nancy Myers is threatened to keep quiet about travels she can’t remember, struggling magician, David Aguilera, and Richard Jackson, a pilot on thin ice with both his boss and wife, are sole witnesses to strange lights while their plane plummets. Miraculously surviving the fall, David...

Gideon Groebel is barely old enough to remember what the bees looked like and only knows about the Dieoff thanks to the internet. Suddenly finding himself in possession of the only known hive in the country—and hunted for it—he seeks sanctuary on a small farmhouse off the road, which only lands...