Tantalizing Tales — August 2026 — Part One

Happy August everybody! The weather in Maryland is hot and humid and gross rn, but I have several delightful reads to help give you a break from the world outside.

So one of the weirder things about being a book critic of some popularity is that I often have books land on my desk that I don’t remember requesting. But that’s alright, and exactly why I have this column: to feature outliers that I can’t quite fit into my schedule but are of high interest to myself and hopefully to you too, dear reader.

Eli Raphael’s debut coming-of age novel Night Objects is one such book. I am an absolute sucker for a boarding school murder mystery, which is exactly what our heroine Lenny Winter finds herself in the middle of after unexpected tragedy lands her at Blanchard, an exclusive academy for the Pacific Northwest’s elite.

At the heart of Blanchard lies the Pascalianum Club, a secret society that boasts the membership of the school’s best and most notorious students and alumni. Lenny wants to find a place to belong, but the more she engages with the club, the more she realizes that its dark glamour feeds off of her own vulnerabilities. When murder befalls club and campus, Lenny will have to face up to where she’s come from and who she’s now become, and what she’s willing to risk in order to become who she truly wants to be.

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Looking forward to next week, we have another stunning debut in Liam Higginson’s The Hill In The Dark Grove, a horror novel steeped in Welsh mythology. From the publicity materials:

“Carwyn and his wife, Rhian, have lived a quiet life as sheep farmers in the remote Welsh mountains for decades, tending to ancestral land that has been in Carwyn’s family for generations. But recent years have taken their toll: local friends lost one by one to old age or rising prices; the accumulation of debts; new English tourists, more every year, disrespecting the land—littering, camping on private property, needing to be rescued when they misjudge the elements.

“When Carwyn finds a strange stone head in a disused corner of the farm, he realizes the artifact is just one piece of something much larger—something unfathomably old. Despite Rhian’s protests, Carwyn becomes obsessed with unearthing the structure, and soon neglects the daily work of the farm to keep digging. Meanwhile, the sheep fall sick more easily than any season before, and a tragic accident on market day threatens to leave an increasingly isolated Rhian without a way to satisfy their ever-more-insistent creditors. Through it all, Carwyn becomes convinced that uncovering the site and determining its original purpose will be the key to solving everything. But there was a reason his ancestors kept the past buried, and in disturbing the earth, he has called forth a power greater and more terrible than he could have imagined.”

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Finally, we have Dave Kellett’s Drive comics series, for which he was recently nominated for the 2026 Hugo for Best Professional Artist. He very generously provided copies of the entire story to date to Hugo voters, and since I won’t have time to dive into the five-volume collection for a while, I thought I’d mention them here, especially since physical bundles are currently on sale at the link above.

The series itself takes place in a far future where a Second Spanish Empire has taken to the stars and now spreads across the galaxy. This empire was, however, built on technology stolen from an alien civilization that calls itself the Continuum of Makers. The Continuum wants their technology back, and is ready to go to holy war to retrieve it.

The Empire has little chance of surviving this battle… until the discovery of a pilot who can fly a starship like no one’s ever seen before. All that the Empire needs now is to find ten thousand more pilots like him. Trouble is, no one knows where this tiny, mysterious creature is from, not even the creature himself.

The scout ship Machito has been tasked with the search for more of these alien beings. Captain Taneel (lol) has no love for the Empire, but the fate of humanity itself is at stake. Can she and her scrappy crew figure out a way to save humanity from sure destruction?

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All of 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!