I’m squeezing this blog post in roughly 20 minutes before I leave for MORE travel. I’m accompanying my partner’s band on a short tour of the UK and Europe, and will miss the end/beginning of the month, so I’m posting here while I can! Without further ado, here’s what I read in October!
NINTH HOUSE TRILOGY
DEAD BEAT
Leigh Bardugo (2026)
The much anticipated finale of the Ninth House trilogy, Dead Beat does a great job wrapping up many of the plot threads left open from the second book, and even calls back to characters and events that haven’t had much play since the first installment, Ninth House. I feel like I could have absolutely devoured this book in a few sittings like I did the first two, but alas, I was still fighting against jet-lag for this one.
Our heroine Alex, and her fellow pilgrims to hell/found family Darlington, Detective Turner, Pamela Dawes, and kinda-Tripp Helmuth set about to close the gates to Hell that they left open at the end of Hell Bent once and for all, and there is no shortage of demons (and bureaucracy) trying to keep them from finishing the job.
I did feel like a few key plot elements here felt a little…I wouldn’t even say rushed? Maybe just slightly less developed than I would have expected. But I didn’t find it anything that took away from my enjoyment of the book. I expect some of these elements will hit different on the inevitable reread I will be doing at some point in the future. Having kept up with reddit’s response to the book, I think these elements are kind of universally leaving fans unsatisfied, but also I get the impression that many fans had very specific hopes and expectations going into this last book, and it’s always really difficult to keep everyone happy when it comes to a big finale. I didn’t honestly HAVE any major expectations, I just came into this book happy to return to this universe, and so any minor gripes I had, I just took in stride, as I was really just along for the ride.
Overall, I’m happy with this conclusion, and like I said before, I look forward to returning to this book like I did the other two, over and over again.
PARDON THE INTRUSION, I’M HOME! VOLUME 1
Watomura (2025; 2026)
I picked this book up on a whim when we got it into the store, and I don’t know why I got it into my head that there was an element of something supernatural to this book — there’s not.
Pardon the Intrusion is a light rom com manga, centering on the love triangle of Rinko, enthusiastic otaku in her off-hours, and her two neighbors. On one side of her apartment is Satsuki, who’s always been kind and reliable to her, and clearly seems to harbor feelings for her although she hasn’t quite figured it out yet, and on the other side is Usada who also happens to be the creator of Rinko’s favorite manga series.
I have read some rom com manga in my time, with notable favorites being Wotakoi, Sweat and Soap and Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You. Of the three, the focus on our main characters and otaku culture puts this closer to Wotakoi than the other two, so if you like Wotakoi, you might find this up your alley.
I was surprised to reach the end of the first volume to see a letter from the author stating an anime adaptation had been greenlit, and even more surprised when I went to google the series and the anime actually came out earlier this year. I am curious enough to check it out, although I’m not honestly sure if this series will have much sticking power for me — time will tell!
NANA 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION VOL 5
Ai Yazawa (2003; 2026)
Back to the world of early ‘00s Japan fashion and music!
In this volume we’re focused mainly on the kind of…break up? of Nana and Nana. Hurt feelings lead to a major miscommunication, and while Nana O. avoids Nana K., Nana K. moves out, and they lose a chance to share their feelings and reconcile. Truly heartbreaking!
Key in this volume is Nana K. moving into a big penthouse with Takumi, and meeting up with Shin to share a heart to heart. I gotta be honest, I think much of the fanbase hates Takumi and I completely get it. However, in many ways, choosing Takumi is the more responsible thing to do in terms of being able to financially provide for a kid. But a part of me just wants her to have an abortion and continue to lead her own life. But as in real life, you gotta let people make their own choices, and this is one of those examples of letting people do what they’re gonna do, even if it feels wrong.
Despite knowing what Nana K. is doing is the “responsible” thing, I find myself struggling to understand where Nana K is coming from emotionally, at this stage. Her feelings are really complicated — she says she DOES love Takumi, she thinks she loves him more than Nobu — but it’s hard for me as the reader to understand why.
Also key in this volume is the paparazzi (aided by a record label) breaking the news that Nana O. and Ren are dating. They paint Nana O. as a violent, unstable woman with an unsavory past, and in the process pit Blast against Trapnest, before Blast has even fully debuted. Nana O., hoping that somewhere out there Nana K. can hear her (she does!) promises to blow everyone away with Blast, and in a way, they both get the closure of knowing the other one is still thinking about them.
MARROW
Samantha Browning Shea (2025)
I genuinely don’t know that I loved this book, but it did find myself thinking about it a lot when I had set the book down, so I can say with certainty that at the very least I found it thought provoking.
Our main character, Oona, is the outcast daughter of Ursula, a midwife/witch who runs a trendy fertility retreat for the wealthy. Ursula’s retreat, Bare Root, promises to help women achieve pregnancy through grounding, reiki, acupuncture, crystals, and and a similar jumble of other “woo-woo” remedies and methods. However, Ursula is believed to have REAL power, and she has the success rate to prove it. Oona, on the other hand, doesn’t manifest any powers, and after a horrific accident, Oona is sent away from Bare Root, the island of Marrow, magic, all of it.
Now Oona, after a number of miscarriages, returns to Bare Root, under an assumed identity, frantic to try and keep this baby alive, even if it means gaining a blessing from the cold, distant mother who cast her out.
When Oona was a child, Bare Root was a coven of witches/midwives, who lived in near poverty, but when she returns as an adult, the luxury resort she sees is a far cry from what she remembers. And as she spends her time on the island, she both recalls and uncovers more about the accident that lead to her expulsion.
Marrow is definitely about motherhood and daughterhood: what it takes to be a good mother, who gets to call themselves a mother, and the relationships between a parent and child, and especially the longing left in the heart of a neglected child, and how it grows and changes over time. But it’s also about relationships between partners, especially when those partners are parents-to-be who have suffered the heartaches of a miscarriage before, and it’s also about kind of the ….. divine feminine? in the way that this book presents its witchcraft, and also the power of motherhood and childbirth. Is the craft real or not, is a large question we’re led to ask throughout the book, as through Oona’s perspective, it’s very very real, but to her husband and his family, it’s all a lot of junk.
There’s a lot about Oona that I feel pity for or sympathize with, but largely I did find her selfish and kind of annoying. Mostly, because she calls herself out for being selfish, multiple times, but seems to have no real interiority about it and rarely if ever changes her behavior. I think the book wanted us to really sympathize with her and see her husband as an enemy, but I often felt like she was being unreasonable or unwilling to communicate. She was quickly and easily put on the defensive, and unwilling to meet her husband halfway; accusing him of guilting him with all the sacrifices he’s made for her, but with no real sense of what that means to him, and only thinking of what she’s missed out on or sacrificing herself. I’m sure some of this is intentional, because of course, Oona is a child of loneliness and neglect, and it’s totally possible that a kid like that could grow up with some bad social habits. But jeeze.
I’m also not someone who plans to have kids, and so the main character’s equation of coming into your power with childbirth, and motherhood —being a capital-M Mother — kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I can’t think of a single time in the book that a character makes an acknowledgement that you don’t need to be a mother to have self worth/power (granted, again, this is baked into the main character’s upbringing and point-of-view somewhat so it gets half a pass I guess).
Also, I don’t mean to be too nitpicky, because the book literally is about a very specific kind of motherhood and giving birth that comes along with biological womanhood, but I know there are a lot of TERF-y witchcraft practices, and Ursula’s coven very easily could be this kind of practice, I think. This book avoids the topic of transness entirely, which, again, a part of me is like “that makes sense, that’s not really what the book is about, not sure if it would really make sense to bring trans folks up here,” but I don't know, the topic just was often in the back of my mind while I read this.
If you’re a wine mom who is obsessed with how your life didn’t become whole till you gave birth, you might enjoy this one.
H.P. LOVECRAFT’S THE HOUND AND OTHER STORIES
Gou Tanabe (2014; 2017)
This is, I think, the first of Tanabe’s Lovecraft adaptations I remember seeing, and it’s somehow taken me this long to get around to it. In that time, he’s got a nice selection of Lovecraft works that he’s adapted, and I look forward to getting into all of them, someday.
The three stories contained in this collection are The Temple, The Hound, and The Nameless City.
The Temple follows a group of German soldiers aboard a U-boat during wartime (the original story takes place during WWI but this adaptation bumps it up to WWII) where after taking aboard a mysterious artifact, scavenged from the body of a man clinging to the side of the ship, a series of misfortunes and unexplained events drive the crew deep into madness and mutiny, leading to the submarine sinking permanently below the waters of the ocean, where the last surviving man spots an elaborate ruin he feels compelled to explore.
In The Hound, presumably taking place sometime in the 1800s given the dress of the characters, two young grave robbers have been pilfering coffins for years, building their own morbid museum in their home. Learning about the grave of a man from hundreds of years back who was himself a master grave robber, who was supposedly buried with a rare artifact, the two young men set out to Holland to try and find this treasure for themselves. After locating the grave, the young men hear a baying howl nearby, a warning of the unfortunate events to come.
The final story, The Nameless City, is a fairly straightforward tale of a man who seeks, and enters, a lost city, and is drawn further and further down into a deep dark abyss of which he cannot escape.
Like many spooky girls, I went through a Lovecraft phase in high school, and I read quite a bit of his work, although a lot of it I sadly don’t remember anymore. However, I do remember the feeling of reading Lovecraft, and in my opinion Tanabe does an excellent job both adapting and illustrating these classic tales.
BLOOD ON HER TONGUE
Johanna van Veen (2025)
Blood On Her Tongue is the second adult novel from Dutch author Johnna van Veen. I had previously read her first novel, My Darling Dreadful Thing, which I enjoyed, but perhaps devoured too quickly because, while it certainly left me with an emotional feel, I unfortunately don’t recall the details of.
Blood On Her Tongue is kind of a vampire novel….except not really? Twins Lucy and Sarah have always been close, as twins are wont to be, but as adults, and in the wake of their parents’ deaths, their lives have grown apart somewhat. Sarah got married and moved away to become a part of the landed gentry, while Lucy, who has always viewed herself as the “lesser twin” stayed behind to become a companion to an older widow. However, when Sarah takes seriously ill, her husband summons Lucy out to their secluded, spooky manor to help tend for her, and the mysteries behind Sarah’s transformation begin to unfold.
As I mentioned above, this is a sort of vampire novel, in that there are terrible appetites and an undead transformation of a kind, but if you go into this thinking you’re going to get a traditional vampire story, you’d be disappointed. Throughout the book, they invoke changelings and revenants, but neither of those are quite right either. And as with My Darling Dreadful Thing, there is a question of madness; what’s real and what’s not.
The execution of this question, “is this real or not?” actually reminded me a lot of Affinity, by Sarah Waters, which I read back in May. I think if we take everything in Blood On Her Tongue at face value, we can take the assumption that this book’s answer to that question goes in completely the opposite direction as Affinity. But does it matter?
I think that in this book, reality is defined not by the actual events happening, but everything surrounding them. This is a gothic novel, like van Veen’s first book, set in 1887. Gender dynamics are very much in play with how these characters interact with each other, and Sarah and Lucy are constantly at odds with the way the world around them treats women, especially how men specifically treat women who are different at all from the expected norm. To that end, it doesn’t matter whether you believe Sarah is transforming into an undead creature or not, her either way her life is at risk purely by the time and place she is living.
This book also likes to ponder what it means to be a “whole” person, which is interesting when you discuss it in terms of twins, especially since they often compare and contrast the personalities of Lucy and Sarah, one of which is presumed to be the more “dominant” twin, and the other “weak”.
I loved the general setting of this book more than I did van Veen’s first novel, but I think overall My Darling Dreadful Thing left a more lasting impression on me. I still would recommend this for the gothic vibes — and the gore.
I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT HORSES AND SEX
Lisa Hanawalt (2026)
While I haven’t read all of Lisa Hanawalt’s work, I really loved her graphic novels My Dirty Dumb Eyes and Hot Dog Taste Test, and was really excited to see this come in to our shop.
I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses And Sex is a humorous autobio comic about being a horse girl, but also about navigating relationships in your late 30’s/early 40’s, from experimenting with opening a relationship with a long term partner, to break ups, to trying to get back out there when you feel as broken as your heart.
A large portion of the book is also a reflection on motherhood and the desire, or lack thereof, to have children. In a way, this book sits kind of starkly in contrast to Marrow, above. Lisa Hanawalt takes us through the journey of deciding to have her eggs frozen just in case she does decide motherhood is a road she wants to go down.
Like all of Hanawalt’s works, this book is equal parts vulnerable and tender, but also incredibly funny and relatable.
DELUSION VOL 1
Hongjacga (2022; 2026)
In this manhwa, a young artist named Yun I-ho is hired by a reclusive woman to paint her portrait. When he arrives, he finds portraits of the woman through the years, aging gracefully, but to his surprise when he meets her face to face, the woman, Song Jeong-hwa, appears incredibly young; much younger than she should be.
After discovering her secret — that she is a vampire— Yun requests to hear her life story in order to help paint her as an elderly woman (at the age she should appear to be) more accurately. In this volume, she begins to recount her history to the artist. But how much of what she says can be trusted? As vampire hunters swarm around her, her time to tell her story may be running out.
The art in this book is gorgeous and enchanting, and while I did find this story a little slow at first, once we get into Song’s history, I found myself hooked. I love historical fiction, historical horror especially, and getting a look at1800s-1930s Korea is a perspective I don’t often encounter in my reads, so this was a real treat. Alongside the sense of mystery, there’s also plenty of action and intrigue once you get into the second half of the book. And having our artist main character, focused on completing his painting, and attempting to conjure Song’s accurate age, reminds me ever so lightly of The Picture of Dorian Grey, but sort of in reverse, I guess.
I believe this will be completed in three volumes, and I’ve heard there is a live action adaptation planned to be released soon, and I’m definitely curious to check it out.
PHENOMENON X: PARANORMAL CRIME FILES VOL 1
Nakaya Onsen (2025; 2026)
This series about two paranormal investigators thrown together in search of the truth wears its influences on its sleeve — the creator’s note on the last page is a love letter to The X-Files, so yeah, they’re definitely not trying to hide it.
This is a paranormal buddy cop series, with rookie agent / demi-human Anan being recruited by federal agent Kanai to investigate unexplained events, due to her keen eye and reasoning in the face of inter-departmental bureaucracy when faced with something she can’t scientifically quantify.
Cases in this volume range from spontaneous human combustion to rapid mummification, to a magnificent garden thriving out of season, with a dead body at its center. So far none of these cases have like, completely blown my mind or anything, but they do feel familiar and exciting, and I enjoy the dynamics between our two main characters. They’re not 1:1 Mulder and Scully analogs thankfully, but they do have a chemistry that makes you want to see them keep working together, and how they’ll approach problems and cases in the future.
As a major X-Files fan myself, I’ll definitely have an eye on Phenomenon X going forward!
I look forward to reading more on the trip, during flights/on the road time (I’m halfway through my next book now), so for now, see you next month!
—M.