Nicholas “Coal” Claus used to love Christmas. Until his father, the reigning Santa, turned the holiday into a PR façade. Coal will do anything to escape the spectacle, including getting tangled in a drunken, supremely hot make- out session with a beautiful man behind a seedy bar one night.
But the heir to Christmas is soon commanded to do his duty: he will marry his best friend, Iris, the Easter Princess and his brother’s not-so-secret crush. A situation that has disaster written all over it.
Things go from bad to worse when a rival arrives to challenge Coal for the princess’s hand…and Coal comes face-to-face with his mysterious behind-the-bar hottie: Hex, the Prince of Halloween.
It’s a fake competition between two holiday princes who can’t keep their hands off each other over a marriage of convenience that no one wants. And it all leads to one of the sweetest, sexiest, messiest, most delightfully unforgettable love stories of the year.
Most of my romance reading happens on my tablet. At first, that was because I was slightly embarrassed to be seen in public reading a romance novel, and hiding a cover is infinitely easier when the book is digital. The only other solution I could think of was creating false dust jackets for physical books, and honestly, I’m just not that crafty. These days, it’s mostly practical: Kindle Unlimited makes my romance reading a hell of a lot cheaper. I do still buy physical copies occasionally, but it’s usually my favorite Mary Calmes books — the ones that, for whatever reason, feel like they belong both on my shelves and on my tablet.
The Nightmare Before Kissmas is one of the very rare exceptions I’ve made to those unspoken rules. Last December, while browsing Barnes & Noble, I wandered past the romance table — something I always do, even though it’s almost entirely straight romances. Every now and then, though, there will be one or two gay romance titles mixed in, and that December, The Nightmare Before Kissmas was one of them. Without any real conscious decision-making, my hands reached out, and before I fully processed what was happening, I was at the counter paying for it. And then it sat on my shelf for a full year, patiently waiting to be read.
I knew going in that it would be cute. I mean, it’s the Crown Prince of Christmas falling for the Crown Prince of Halloween — the cuteness is baked right into the premise. What I wasn’t expecting were the political machinations underpinning the story, particularly a Santa so consumed by grief and anger that his own children become pawns in a larger power struggle. I also wasn’t expecting to be just as invested in that surrounding story as I was in the romance itself. And the romance, for lack of a better word, was absolutely adorable.
Coal and Hex aren’t exactly champions of communication, but given their roles within their respective holidays and the immense familial expectations placed on them, that feels not just believable but inevitable. They’re clearly right for each other, and it’s impossible not to root for them as they try to carve out space for themselves beyond what duty demands. Since the story is told entirely from Coal’s perspective, we only see the relationship through his eyes, but he’s refreshingly honest about his own flaws — particularly his rebellious streak, which has caused more than a little chaos in the past. Over the course of the book, Coal does a great deal of growing up, driven partly by his relationship with Hex, but mostly by his desire to repair the damage his father has inflicted on Christmas and the other winter holidays.
I absolutely adored Coal and Hex, and while I know they’ll appear again in later books, I’m already sad to leave them behind as the main protagonists — especially Coal. Not someone I’ll admit to developing a crush on, but definitely someone for whom I gained a tremendous amount of respect.
Challenges: Yuletide Spirit
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