The Gratitude Turkey: A Novel

Think "A Christmas Carol" meets "It's a Wonderful Life" but with Thanksgiving instead of Christmas... Peter, Ronald, Harold and Mary Klein are the four children of a wealthy Connecticut family. One Thanksgiving, they are visited by a magical spirit, the Gratitude Turkey, who possesses a plastic inflatable lawn-decoration turkey-dressed-like-a-pilgrim balloon and does a happy song and dance to teach them about being grateful on Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, upon seeing a balloon come to life, they assume they are in a horror movie, freak out, and don't learn the lesson at all. Twenty years later, they are still holding onto their childhood trauma, and their lives are falling apart. Peter, who inherited the family's money, has become poor. Ronald came out as gay and lived a fun life but then got very sick and now has a terminal illness. Harold lives a seemingly perfect life with a trophy wife and three picture-perfect children but has morbid regrets about failing to achieve his dreams and hides a nasty drugs-and-alcohol problem to go with a violent temper. Mary tried her best to pursue her passion as a visual artist and watched her career crash and burn. At a Thanksgiving family reunion, as adults, they are visited by an evil spirit named Death Light, who offers to give them new lives in return for them selling their souls to the Devil. In that moment, the Gratitude Turkey reappears and takes one last shot at teaching the four Kleins to be grateful for their lives on Thanksgiving, to try to save their souls. Will the Gratitude Turkey win, or will Death Light claim four souls? This magical realism urban fantasy Thanksgiving holiday novel is a standalone novel complete story which runs to about 250 pages. Once you start reading it, prepare to be captivated and enchanted by a truly heartwarming and inspirational story, like a faerie tale for the modern age. Enjoy!

Russell Hasan was born the son of a white Jewish mother and a dark-skinned Muslim father—and that isn't the strangest thing about him. His father had ties to the mafia—nope, not the weirdest thing about him. He thought he was a gay man for many years before realizing he is agender asexual—relatively normal compared to what truly makes him strange. Do you want to know what the weirdest, strangest thing about Russell is? He's a WRITER. Yes, that's right. He writes. Why? How? Why would he want to do that to himself? How could he allow this to happen to himself? He is still trying to figure that one out. Therapy can cure lots of things and alcohol and drugs can cure other things, but the only cure for being a writer is to write, so he writes. He's not into BDSM, yet for some reason he has chosen to punish himself by having a passion for writing and a need to write. Despite having made the huge mistake of choosing to be a writer, his books have sold over 10,000 copies, so perhaps it was not the worst mistake he ever made after all. He does not have one particular bestseller but has instead spread those 10,000 sales across many books he wrote. His magical journey of self-torture begins when he has the idea for a new book, and then continues when he wakes up at 6am to write from 6am to 8am before work every day (he has a day job—he's not insane! His day job is being a lawyer, the most boring, evil job in the world, by the way), and, after many cups of Starbucks matcha tea and Coca Cola (never Pepsi—yuck!) he somehow puts words onto a page. He has written 30 books, both nonfiction and fiction, but, as something of a twist on the traditional successful indie author model, he is known more for his indie nonfiction, not his fiction. But he does write fiction. Some of his fiction is good too, probably, he hopes.