Tantalizing Tales — April 2026 — Part Three

Lol, just as I thought I was coming out of the woods, I’m back to being bedridden and canceling chamber orchestra rehearsals because I’m feverish, fatigued and, in a new development, achey at primarily my extremities instead of all over. Is that progress? I’m so tired, I don’t even know any more.

But I’ve been trying to distract myself with reading, as one does, and am super looking forward to two upcoming releases (as well as to finally finding the time to go over some books from 2025 that I still really want to get to!) First of the former category is Kat Cho’s Gods & Comics, which touches on multiple deeply relatable topics to me, a former teenage overachiever whose own creative pursuits often felt like they spilled over paracosmically into real life.

Grace Bak is seventeen, junior class vice president, and wholly determined to follow in the footsteps of her doctor parents. The debilitating panic attacks she occasionally suffers from are not part of the plan. Neither is the death of her beloved grandmother, who stepped in and helped keep their little family together after the death of Grace’s mom. Bereft of her support system, Grace finds solace in anonymously creating and publishing a webcomic called Sun God, based on the Korean folktales that her recently departed halmeoni used to tell her.

Her tale of the sun deity Haemosu and his beloved Yuhwa becoming accidentally trapped in the bodies of high schoolers goes unexpectedly viral. Even more surprising for Grace is Haemosu himself somehow taking corporeal form due to this newfound fandom. Bereft of his divine powers, he needs Grace’s help in order to get home. The more time they spend together, tho, the more reluctant Grace is to lose him. Complicating matters is the fact that her webcomic brought more than one god to the mortal realm, as Hae’s divine nemesis is hellbent on destroying the Sun God, no matter who stands in the way.

Also, that Take On Me-esque cover is just the best, 10/10, no notes!

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This next book was an instant addition to my TBR pile when it was likened to Maria Dong’s excellent Liar, Dreamer, Thief, tho I believe it lacks the speculative fiction quality of that last. Instead Erin Van Der Meer’s The Scoop is a modern-day satire about clickbait journalism from a former journalist herself.

After losing her dream job at Marie Claire just a few scant months ago, journalist Frankie Miller has grown increasingly desperate to make ends meet, given the high cost of living in New York City. When she’s offered the position of Night Editor at The Scoop, a tabloid website run with an iron fist by its editor-in-chief David Brown, she tells herself that it’s only a temporary job until she gets back to more respectable reporting.

But the longer she’s immersed in the clickbait world of tabloid journalism, the more lines she finds herself willing to cross. After a story she publishes humiliates a beloved pop star, her still lingering grief over the death of her mother resurfaces, setting off a chain reaction of events that spirals well out of Frankie’s control. Soon, Frankie has to ask herself how much of her integrity she’s truly willing to give up in the chase for clout, clicks and manufactured outrage.

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Looking back at 2025, I’m positively burning to dive into Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper’s illustrated, interactive mystery hardback You Are The Detective: The Creeping Hand Murder. I’m still having a tough time actually getting into the last book of this sort I own — despite having carried it around with me for weeks! — but once I get through that game, it is definitely on to this one!

The scenario goes thusly: in November of 1933, seven seemingly unrelated people — an actress, a cook, an Earl, a lothario, a novelist, a poet and a telephone operator — receive mysterious letters claiming to know their deepest, darkest secret. Further, the letters threaten exposure unless the recipients come to a certain London address. At the posh townhouse where they’ve been gathered, one of the seven is stabbed right in front of the others… yet none of the others see it happen. More perplexingly, none of them could have possibly been in a position to stab American novelist Roy Peterson themselves. It’s almost as if a disembodied hand wielded the blade that ended his life.

Scotland Yard has enlisted You the Reader’s help in solving this diabolical crime. Who summoned these people together, and what could they possibly have in common besides a guilty secret? Your most important task, however, is to identify whodunnit and why, and thus solve the Case of the Creeping Hand.

This volume serves as the case dossier of what’s hopefully the first in a long series. Filled with documents containing written and visual clues, the illustrated pages allow readers to puzzle out the mystery as you go along, before all is revealed at the end. I am exactly the target audience for this kind of book and it hurts so bad that I still haven’t found time to read it. I also need to compare notes with Emily, who talked about this title (and several exciting others) back in September!

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Another interactive kind of story is contained in Abigail Hing Wen’s The Vale, with illustrations by Yuna Cheong and Brandon Wu. This is, indeed, the novel that served as the inspiration for the hit Roblox game, and has a prequel short film starring Lea Salonga!

From the promotional materials:

“Thirteen-year-old Bran Joseph Lee has spent half his life building the Vale, an immersive, AI-generated, virtual-reality environment using technology created by his inventor parents. It’s a lush fantasy world complete with a Blue Forest, a Castle, and adventures with his mushroom-obsessed Elf named Gnomly–a much better place to spend his days compared to his real life, where his parents have suffered through the failed launches of one invention after another.

“Bran wants nothing more than to see his Elves come fully to life, a hope that seems on the brink of reality when he enters the Vale in a multi-million-dollar competition to fund its further development. But instead, things in the Vale begin to go wrong: The sunlight is fading. A beautiful girl appears from nowhere. A wizard is stealing from the Vale’s inhabitants. And the strangest part of all is that none of this is the young inventor’s doing.

“Can Bran and Gnomly uncover the truth of what is happening before both their worlds are destroyed?”

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Another novel with video game ties that I really want to dive into soon is Andrew Rowe’s indie LitRPG bestseller How To Defeat A Demon King In Ten Easy Steps, republished in a deluxe hardcover format with a brand new afterword by S&S/Saga Press.

Every thousand years, an evil Demon King rises to conquer humanity and crush everyone in his path. Fortunately, a Hero is always born a hundred years later who will defeat him and save the world. When the latest Demon King begins this cycle of conquest, humanity is already predisposed to grit their collective teeth and wait for their Hero.

Trouble is, it hasn’t even been a quarter-century yet and the Demon King has already conquered more than half the world. If humanity has to wait another 77 years for their hero, it might very well be too late to save the entire world from annihilation.

Yui Shaw doesn’t technically have the Hero class, but she figures that if she follows her 10-step plan for defeating the Demon King, then she can probably do a competent enough job of it, maybe? She’ll have to find a way to obtain the Hero’s legendary sword, earn obscure classes to level up, make allies and increase her skills by surviving carefully constructed dungeons. Easy peasy for someone as skilled at finding loopholes as she is… right?

Andrew Rowe used to design games professionally for companies such as Blizzard Entertainment, Cryptic Studios and Obsidian Entertainment. His experience shines through in this homage to games like The Legend Of Zelda and its RPG counterparts.

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And if that’s enough fiction, fantastic or otherwise, for you, we close our weekly roundup with a thoughtful humanist meditation on the importance and power of translation, in renowned Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s From Language To Language, translated from the original French by Dylan Temel.

We at The Frumious Consortium highly value the work of skilled translators, and have made a point to ensure that they’re properly credited in all of our reviews. So I obviously jumped at the chance to highlight a scholarly work on the philosophy of translation, both of art and in more prosaic communications. Ironically, I haven’t yet found time to actually read this yet, but hope springs eternal.

In this slender volume, the professor draws on his own multicultural background — Senegalese, French and American — to examine the relationship between languages and the ways in which translators serve not only as interpreters of intent but also mediators of cultures. Subtitled The Hospitality Of Translation, it dives into the importance of the work not only as a means for communication but also as a way to foster a shared sense of humanity. In this increasingly turbulent day and age, we could definitely use a little (a lot) more of that.

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All these books are either available or available for pre-order now, so let me know if you’re able to get to them before I do, dear readers! I’d love to hear your opinions, and see if that will spur me to push any of them higher up the mountain range that is my To Be Read pile.

And, as always, you can check out the list of my favorite books in my Bookshop storefront linked below!