Laura's story "Smokeless" is about a young man on the frontier between Christian and Muslim territories trapped in an impossible dilemma with a djinn.
If aliens made you an offer you couldn’t refuse, would you still wager everything on your faith? What price would you pay to save your city? Can the last member of a doomed church find hope once again? Since the original 2016 anthology, Mysterion has carried readers to settings strange and wonderful with stories about the challenges of belief, about characters struggling to understand worlds that cannot make sense—and, when that fails, to be true to their convictions, to hope, and to love.
These twenty-four stories first appeared in the Mysterion online magazine from 2018 to 2019, and are collected here in a single volume for the first time. Aliens and robots, trolls and ghosts, saints and prophets: all have a story to tell, as they delve more deeply into the mysteries of Christian faith. Featuring stories by Jared Oliver Adams, Davian Aw, K.D. Azariah-Kribbs, Laura VanArendonk Baugh, Rebecca Birch, Keyan Bowes, Forrest Brazeal, Méabh de Brún, Stephen Case, Elise Forier Edie, Gregor Hartmann, Frederick Gero Heimbach, Catherine Heloise, Joanna Michal Hoyt, G. Scott Huggins, Duke Kimball, Joel Limmer, Madison McSweeney, Stewart Moore, Wendy Nikel, Kat Otis, S.E. Reid, Joanne Rixon, Eric James Stone, and J.P. Sullivan.
