Welcome to the Launch for
The Claus Box Set Tour
By Tony Bertauski
December Schedule
1 - Launch
5 - Mythical Books & fuonlyknew
7 - Hope To Read
12 - The Review Notes & Book Babble
14 - Grand Finale
The Claus Box Set
Now you can purchase all three books in the Claus Series together!
THE CLAUS UNIVERSE
Four years ago, we were visiting family for the holidays. My
nephew, six years old, was telling us one evening (for no apparent reason, he
was on a roll) about the secret ninja Christmas elves that visit his school
every year. Intrigued, I interviewed him like a federal agent. His story, as
most six year old’s stories go, was full of holes, but he refused to back off
his claim: they were real and I couldn’t prove they weren’t.
Somewhere in the middle of his tale, an idea hit me so hard I
looked stunned. I know this because my wife looked at me and whispered, “You’ve
got a book, don’t you?”
The story of Santa has been told a billion, billion times on the
screen and the television, the written page and the digital, in short form and
long, in verse and song. He’s been animated and claymated, horrified and
glorified. There’s not a single word left unwritten about the jolly old fat
man.
Except, maybe, not that I recall, in science fiction.
Is there one? Is there a story that explains, within reason, how
he hauls all those presents, flies around the world, and shimmies down every
chimney in one night? How he lives on the North Pole without us seeing him?
Where elvens come from? How a snowman can talk and a reindeer can fly? Can they
be explained without, of course, just sweeping all those mysteries under the
rug with the word “magic”?
Not that I recall.
So began the Claus series. It started with Claus: Legend of the
Fat Man, a book that explained how Nicholas Santa had come to live on the
North Pole. It was followed by Jack: The Tale of Frost, a book devoted
to one of my favorite characters, a childish and irreverent and dangerous
elven. And now comes Flury: Journey of a Snowman, the science behind
walking, fighting and flying snowmen.
Each tale is written as a standalone novel, yet contains elements
of each other that can be read in any order. They’re for children and adults.
They can be comical, yet dark. Make-believe, yet real. Magical, but not really.
Because magic, as an elven says, ceases to be magic when we
understand it.
More About the Series
Claus: Legend of the Fat Man
(Claus #1)
by Tony Bertauski
by Tony Bertauski
YA Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Holiday
Paperback & ebook, 326 Pages
June 19th 2012
Paperback & ebook, 326 Pages
June 19th 2012
The Christmas story you never heard.
In the early 1800s, Nicholas, Jessica and Jon Santa attempt the first human trek to the North Pole and stumble upon an ancient race of people left over from the Ice Age. They are short, fat and hairy. They slide across the ice on scaly soles and carve their homes in the ice that floats on the Arctic Ocean. The elven are adapted to life in the extreme cold. They are as wise as they are ancient.
Their scientific advancements have yielded great inventions -- time-stopping devices and gravitational spheres that build living snowmen and genetically-modified reindeer that leap great distances. They’ve even unlocked the secrets to aging. For 40,000 years, they have lived in peace.
Until now.
An elven known as The Cold One has divided his people. He’s tired of their seclusion and wants to conquer the world. Only one elven stands between The Cold One and total chaos. He’s white-bearded and red-coated. The Santa family will help him stop The Cold One. They will come to the aid of a legendary elven known as...Claus.
Jack: The Tale of Frost
(Claus #2)
by Tony Bertauski
by Tony Bertauski
YA Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Holiday
Paperback & ebook, 290 Pages
October 17th 2013
Paperback & ebook, 290 Pages
October 17th 2013
Sura is sixteen years old when she meets Mr. Frost. He’s very short and very fat and he likes his room very, very cold. Some might say inhumanly cold. His first name isn’t Jack, she’s told. And that’s all she needed to know.
Mr. Frost’s love for Christmas is over-the-top and slightly psychotic. And why not? He’s made billions of dollars off the holiday he invented. Or so he claims. Rumor is he’s an elven, but that’s silly. Elven aren’t real. And if they were, they wouldn’t live in South Carolina. They wouldn’t hide in a tower and go to the basement to make…things.
Nonetheless, Sura will work for this odd little recluse. Frost Plantation is where she’ll meet the love of her life. It’s where she’ll finally feel like she belongs somewhere. And it’s where she’ll meet someone fatter, balder and stranger than Mr. Frost. It’s where she’ll meet Jack.
Jack hates Christmas.
Flury: Journey of a Snowman
(Claus #3)
by Tony Bertauski
by Tony Bertauski
YA Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Holiday
Paperback & ebook, 300 Pages
November 15th 2014
Paperback & ebook, 300 Pages
November 15th 2014
Life hasn’t been kind to Oliver Toye.
As if juvenile diabetes isn’t enough, he’s forced to live with his tyrannical grandmother in a snow-bound house. He spends his days doing chores and the nights listening to the forest rumble.
But when he discovers the first leather-bound journal, the family secrets begin to surface. The mystery of his great-grandfather’s voyage to the North Pole is revealed. That’s when the snowman appears.
Magical and mysterious, the snowman will save Oliver more than once. But when the time comes for Oliver to discover the truth, will he have the courage? When Flury needs him, will he have the strength? When believing isn’t enough, will he save the snowman from melting away?
Because sometimes even magic needs a little help.
About Tony Bertauski
My grandpa never graduated high school. He retired from a steel mill in the mid-70s. He was uneducated, but he was a voracious reader. I remember going through his bookshelves of paperback sci-fi novels, smelling musty old paper, pulling Piers Anthony and Isaac Asimov off shelf and promising to bring them back. I was fascinated by robots that could think and act like people. What happened when they died?
I'm a cynical reader. I demand the writer sweep me into his/her story and carry me to the end. I'd rather sail a boat than climb a mountain. That's the sort of stuff I want to write, not the assigned reading we got in school. I want to create stories that kept you up late.
Having a story unfold inside your head is an experience different than reading. You connect with characters in a deeper, more meaningful way. You feel them, empathize with them, cheer for them and even mourn. The challenge is to get the reader to experience the same thing, even if it's only a fraction of what the writer feels. Not so easy.
In 2008, I won the South Carolina Fiction Open with Four Letter Words, a short story inspired by my grandfather and Alzheimer's Disease. My first step as a novelist began when I developed a story to encourage my young son to read. This story became The Socket Greeny Saga. Socket tapped into my lifetime fascination with consciousness and identity, but this character does it from a young adult's struggle with his place in the world.
After Socket, I thought I was done with fiction. But then the ideas kept coming, and I kept writing. Most of my work investigates the human condition and the meaning of life, but not in ordinary fashion. About half of my work is Young Adult (Socket Greeny, Claus, Foreverland) because it speaks to that age of indecision and the struggle with identity. But I like to venture into adult fiction (Halfskin, Drayton) so I can cuss. Either way, I like to be entertaining.
And I'm a big fan of plot twists.
$25 Amazon gift card and the Claus Box Set ebook
