Tantalizing Tales — September 2026 — Part Three

The days are getting shorter and the worst of the heat is tapering off, at least in my part of the world! Hopefully the weather is also getting (or remaining!) nice and comfy in yours, with plenty of time for reading awesome books, like the following great selections.

We begin with the immaculate vibes of Marshall J Moore’s The Henchperson’s Guide To Unionizing. Labor Day may have come and gone here in the US but it’s always a good time to remember the rights that unions carved out for those of us in the workforce, whether we work for supervillains or otherwise (so yes, there are definite Halloween vibes going on here, too!)

In this comedic fantasy novel, Igor is the loyal assistant to a brilliant but demanding Doctor. Igor digs up graves, performs minor surgery and generally looks after his mad genius boss, for little thanks and questionable pay. But he believes in the Doctor’s mission of bringing new life to dead flesh, so is happy to put up with a lot in their joint quest for scientific revolution.

After a crowd of pitchfork- and torch-bearing villagers runs them out of their old digs, Igor and the Doctor are forced to find another place to carry on their mission. The walls of isolated Ravenwald Manor seem promising, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s already inhabited by a vampiric Count and his dissatisfied bride Cornelia. Meanwhile, an enigmatic witch and her feline familiar Grimalkin are also intent on performing an esoteric ritual there, leading to more than a little battling over turf.

Igor keeps the peace between the three factions as best he can. It wouldn’t do to have yet another swarm of villagers descend upon any of them, and working together is the best way to avoid arousing suspicion. He soon discovers, however, that he, Cornelia and Grimalkin have a lot more in common than they’d ever expected. When the three of them realize that their masters aren’t merely misunderstood figures but are actually planning to literally destroy the world, they’ll have to join forces to prevent Armageddon and, perhaps, to finally embrace life on their own terms.

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A less hilarious but just as heartfelt horror lies at the heart of Carrie Lee South’s debut novel In The Woods They Wait.

Audrey Figg is a ranger in Devil’s Den state park. While she spends most of her days training new rangers, helping injured hikers and protecting the forest, her specialty is in wilderness search and rescue. Those skills come in constant use for her, mostly because she keeps searching for the brother she lost in those very same woods so long ago.

Fifteen years earlier, Audrey’s little brother Benny vanished while they were on a family vacation together. Ever since then, Audrey has kept a terrible secret in her heart. She has, however, never stopped looking for her brother.

When a little girl named Ivy goes missing in a manner eerily reminiscent of Benny’s disappearance, Audrey’s buried secrets begin to float up to the surface, demanding that she stop looking away from them. For it looks increasingly as if both Ivy and Benny didn’t simply wander off into the woods but were deliberately taken by something that still haunts the backcountry. With a fresh trail to follow, will Audrey be able to rescue Ivy and perhaps finally learn what happened to her brother? And what price will she ultimately be willing to pay to find that kind of closure?

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Our next thriller also has elements of the supernatural, though geared at a Young Adult audience. Erin Cotter’s A Dangerous Bargain is a historical romance set in an alternate Renaissance-era Florence, where angels walk amongst humankind.

Virgil is a seventeen year-old artist who doesn’t have much longer to live. He bargained away the rest of his mortal days to an angel, in order to be able to support his family in the present instead. Which would be fine, until he learns that his missing younger brother is in danger, and can only be saved by the magic that Virgil can no longer bargain for himself.

Out of desperation, he decides to team up with the infuriatingly talented and annoyingly notorious polymath playboy Leonardo da Vinci, in a last ditch attempt to find and rescue his brother. As the duo journey through Florence’s gilded streets, glorious cathedrals and luxurious Medici palaces in search of answers, they begin to unearth the city’s darkest truths. Soon they’re risking their lives to expose secrets that the city’s most rich and powerful would do anything to protect. Virgil hasn’t shied away from bargaining with his life, not if it meant protecting his family. But will he also have to risk his soul in his fight to save his brother, and his heart as he battles his growing but inevitably doomed feelings for Leonardo?

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If you’re in more of a non-fiction mood but still have a taste for the supernatural, you can’t miss out on Lisa Perrin’s The Secrets Of The Seance Society. Subtitled Illustrated True Stories of Talking to the Dead, this book is perfect for anyone who loved her earlier book The League Of Lady Poisoners as much as I did.

This volume delights from the very start, as you open the intricately foiled cover to find a fully functional Ouija board stamped on the endpapers. The rest of the book is filled with similarly spooky delights, as the accomplished author-illustrator takes readers on a journey through the Victorian-era Spiritualist movement, using her trademark wit in both writing and art.

Highlighting the larger-than-life characters who stepped into the spotlight and captured the imaginations of millions, Professor Perrin explores the birth of the movement with the rise to fame of the Fox sisters, then follows the timeline through the outrageous exploits of other mediums, and the falling out between true believer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his much more skeptical friend Harry Houdini. As Prof Perrin investigates the “celebrities, investigators, fraudsters, reformers, and rebels of the age,” she explores the question of why Spiritualism had such a chokehold on the era, and why its effects continue to linger through the decades, even to our modern day.

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Finally, our sole non-supernatural selection this week is Alexis Nikole Nelson a.k.a Black Forager’s Happy Snacking, Don’t Die! (non-supernatural that is, unless you, like I, consider her ability to successfully forage nothing short of magical.)

In her very first cookbook, the social media star invites readers in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere to discover the abundance growing around us, whether in our own backyards or slightly further afield in public parks and trails. She translates her skills with foraging and vegan cooking into this helpful book, complete with plant identification photos as well as tips on safe and ethical foraging.

This guide also shows us how every season has options for turning common flora and fungi into delicious plant-based meals. The publicity materials give us a tantalizing sample: “In spring, you’ll learn to pickle Magnolia flowers and turn Japanese Knotweed into a refreshing granita. Summer is for frying up Milkweed Buds, making Juneberry Hand Pies, and crafting Rosewater Baklava. When fall arrives, you’ll be making savory mushroom dishes (a.k.a. chicken of the woods) like Maitake steak and bacon. And in winter, cozy up with Pine Shortbread Cookies and Oyster Mushroom Chowdah.”

I’m hoping to do a full review of this book (and several others in this column!) soon but I’m still psyching myself up to attempt Karen Thi’s mind-blowing Spookie Cookies. Wish me luck with both!

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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!