When the people carrying the coffins finally compare notes, the whole monster story changes.
The Henchperson’s Guide to Unionizing | Marshall J. Moore | Bantam | 22 September 2026 |
Marshall J. Moore’s The Henchperson’s Guide to Unionizing takes the furniture of classic Gothic horror, the mad scientist, the vampire, the witch, the torch-bearing mob, then asks who has been doing all the unpaid work. The answer is where the fun begins. Igor, Cornelia and Grimalkin are not side jokes waiting for their masters to enter the room. They are workers, companions, captives and people with lives of their own. Moore turns that simple shift in viewpoint into a warm, funny fantasy about labour, loyalty, prejudice and self-worth without sanding the monsters down into harmless mascots or turning danger decorative.
“Moore gives the henchpeople the story, the dignity and, at last, the leverage, turning Gothic servitude into a sharp, funny argument about labour, loyalty and the dangerous moment when the people carrying the coffins finally compare notes.”
The Henchperson’s Guide to Unionizing Review: Monsters, Labour and Found Family
Every monster story has somebody carrying the jars.
Usually we do not ask who scrubbed the blood off the slab, who packed the laboratory before the peasants arrived, or who remembered to put a fresh brain in the luggage. Marshall J. Moore does. The Henchperson’s Guide to Unionizing begins with the old shapes of Gothic horror and quietly moves the camera three feet to the side. Suddenly the manservant is the centre of the frame, and the genius in the goggles looks a good deal less impressive when somebody starts counting the chores.
Igor works for the Doctor. The work is broad in scope and poor in rewards. He robs graves, selects body parts, stitches corpses, keeps the equipment in order, buys supplies, cooks, packs, carries and generally prevents the Doctor from becoming collateral damage in his own experiments. The Doctor, meanwhile, reserves most of his attention for the Great Work, a stitched-together body intended to prove that death can be beaten. When another angry mob drives them from yet another laboratory, they move to Ravenwald Manor and find that the place is already crowded with a vampiric Count and his dissatisfied bride, Cornelia, while a witch and her feline familiar, Grimalkin, also have plans for the house.
The arrangement is a wonderful comic engine because everybody thinks they are the lead character in a different kind of story. The Doctor wants his tale of forbidden science. The Count arrives with all the entitlement of old blood and older appetites. The witch carries the weight of ritual and occult power. The villagers have rehearsed the part where righteous fear becomes a torchlit procession. Yet Moore keeps returning to the people behind them, the ones expected to fetch, carry, obey and absorb the consequences.
That is the joke. It is also the argument.
The best satire does not need to stop the story and point at its target. Moore lets hierarchy reveal itself through routine. Igor’s labour is treated as invisible because it is constant. Competence becomes the very reason nobody thanks him. The more reliably he solves problems, the easier it is for the Doctor to imagine that the problems solve themselves. There is a recognisable truth in that, and the Gothic setting gives it enough distance to remain funny without becoming toothless.
The opening chapter, now publicly available in excerpt, shows Moore’s method cleanly. Igor surveys the body on the slab with the pride of a craftsperson. He notices the quality of the stitching, the difficulty of matching limbs and the practical problem of finding fresh organs. The Doctor sees a grand experiment. Igor sees the workbench. That distinction matters. Moore gives us the familiar lightning, stone tower and reanimated corpse imagery, but the prose keeps nudging us towards logistics: labels, stairs, packing cases, organ jars, escape routes. The Gothic spectacle is still there, only now somebody has to inventory it.
Even the rhythm of the scene is doing thematic work. The Doctor speaks in declarations. Igor moves. The Doctor names the vision. Igor remembers the missing brain. The Doctor insults. Igor compensates. Then, when danger arrives, the Doctor continues performing genius while Igor calculates the actual risk. The funniest beat is not a gag pasted onto the horror. It comes from the gap between status and usefulness.
Moore’s prose is like a well-run laboratory in a thunderstorm: every beaker is labelled, every wire has a purpose, and there is always something sparking in the corner. The sentences are clear, quick and alert to physical comedy. He knows when to let a description carry the joke and when to cut short. He also knows that a character can be funny without being treated as ridiculous. That point is crucial with Igor.
There would have been an easy, ugly version of this book in which Igor’s body is part of the punchline. Moore does something better. Igor’s limp, mismatched legs and hunched back affect how he moves through the world, but they do not define his worth. His skill with a needle is precise. His practical intelligence is obvious. His patience has been trained into obedience, which is a different thing from stupidity. The tragedy under the comedy is that he has spent so long being useful to somebody else that he mistakes endurance for belonging.
Cornelia and Grimalkin widen the idea. They are not simply alternate versions of Igor with different supernatural decorations. Their ties to their masters have different textures, different histories and different forms of coercion. That gives the central friendship real shape. Solidarity only means something when the people involved are not interchangeable.
Cornelia’s presence also lets Moore play with one of Gothic fiction’s oldest power structures, the immortal aristocrat and the bride whose identity has been folded into his. Here, the relationship between dependence, control and selfhood matters as much as the fangs. Grimalkin, meanwhile, is a gloriously prickly reminder that being familiar, servant or companion does not mean wanting to be possessed. The cat shape carries its own comic timing, but Moore uses that comedy to sharpen questions about identity rather than flatten them.
This is where the title earns more than a laugh.
“Unionizing” could have been a single-joke premise stretched over 384 pages. It is not. Moore understands that a union, in the broadest sense, begins when isolated people compare experiences and discover that what each has been told is a personal failing is actually a pattern. Igor has normalised the Doctor’s treatment because he has no useful comparison. Cornelia and Grimalkin have their own versions of the same trap. Once they talk, the private story changes.
That is a fine engine for found family because the friendship grows from recognition before it grows from affection. They see one another’s situations with a clarity they cannot yet apply to themselves. One can call out another’s mistreatment while still excusing their own. It is funny because people do this constantly. It is painful for the same reason.
The wider advance reaction has focused, rightly, on the book’s warmth. The current Goodreads response is strongly positive, with many early readers praising the cast, the humour, the Gothic manor setting and the sense of hope. Some have called it cosy horror, which fits so long as “cosy” is not mistaken for bloodless. Grave robbing, stitched bodies, predatory monsters and angry mobs remain part of the furniture. Moore simply refuses to believe that horror’s only emotional destination is despair.
That puts the book in an interesting place beside Natalie Zina Walschots’s Hench, another novel interested in the disposable people orbiting larger-than-life villains. Walschots pushes the workplace logic towards damage, bureaucracy and revenge. Moore heads towards mutual care. There is also some Terry Pratchett in the instinct to take a genre convention literally until its social absurdity becomes visible, though Moore’s voice is his own. Readers of T. Kingfisher’s lighter horror and fantasy will recognise the combination of monsters, practical people and humour that never quite dissolves the danger.
The closest comparison, though, may be to the version of Gothic fiction we all carry around even when we have not read its sources in years. Moore is drawing on the cultural afterlife of Frankenstein, Dracula, witches, werewolves and village mobs as much as on any one book. That lets him move quickly. A laboratory tower needs almost no explanation. Neither does a vampire Count in a manor. We know the silhouettes.
Then he gives the silhouettes working conditions.
What lifts the novel from clever premise to five-star territory is the way its themes reinforce rather than compete with one another. Labour and identity are linked. Prejudice and hierarchy are linked. The question of who gets called a monster sits beside the question of who gets to name another person at all. The employers in this book exercise power through status, fear, habit and stories about what their subordinates supposedly owe them. The henchpeople begin to resist by revising those stories.
There is a political charge in that, obviously, but the book does not read like a policy pamphlet wearing a cape. Its interest is human before it is procedural. What do you owe the person who gave you a place in the world? What happens when gratitude becomes a leash? When does loyalty become permission for somebody else to define your limits? And if leaving is dangerous, what changes when you do not have to leave alone?
Moore has been working towards this mix of modes for a while. The Rites of Resurrection trilogy, beginning with The Pale City and continuing through The Ashen City and The Awoken City, already showed his interest in necromancy, social order and the moral status of people treated as tools. The Son of a Sailor trilogy, Son of a Sailor, Prisoners of a Pirate Queen and Enemy of the Empire, leaned into cosy fantasy, community, grief and the families people build for themselves. His first Bantam novel feels less like a sharp turn than a joining of those roads. The corpses have come across from one side. The warmth has come across from the other.
He has also become very good at hiding serious questions inside amiable machinery.
The book’s humour helps. There is something enduringly funny about supernatural grandeur meeting practical inconvenience. Castles have stairs. Experiments need supplies. Dark lords have domestic habits. Furious villagers apparently have to organise childcare before joining the mob. Moore keeps finding the mundane edge of the macabre, and that edge gives the story its voice.
The jokes also protect the book from sentimentality. Found family can become a slogan when every emotional beat is announced in advance. Here it grows through shared tasks, complaints, small acts of regard and the slow discovery that friendship changes what treatment you are willing to accept. The relationships matter because they alter behaviour.
A few advance readers have noted that the story takes a little time to settle into its full rhythm. That is fair, but it is a small issue and, for me, part of the design. The opening has to establish the normality of Igor’s exploitation before comparison can crack it open. If Ravenwald arrived before we understood how thoroughly the Doctor occupies Igor’s sense of what is normal, the later change would have less force. The early repetition is laying track.
Once the household is assembled, the book has the pleasure of watching separate monster traditions knock elbows at the dinner table. It becomes part haunted-house comedy, part workplace revolt, part apocalypse prevention scheme and part argument for the radical idea that being needed is not the same as being valued. Moore balances those strands with more control than the premise suggests. A lesser version would keep escalating the joke until the characters became props. This one does the opposite. The more absurd the situation gets, the more seriously the book takes the people trapped inside it.
That seriousness extends to difference. The early critical response has picked up on the novel’s queer-friendly cast and its refusal to make romance the only form of intimacy that counts. That matters in a story about solidarity. Friendship here is not the waiting room before a romantic pairing. It is a force with its own weight, able to change self-perception and action.
There is also something pleasingly old-fashioned about Ravenwald Manor as a stage. Put enough archetypes under one roof and the house becomes a pressure cooker. Secrets cross corridors. Private arrangements become communal problems. Everybody hears the thunder. Everybody smells the smoke. The nearby villagers function as both threat and mirror, because the book keeps asking whether monstrosity belongs to bodies, appetites, choices or systems of power.
Moore’s answer is not coy.
The monsters who worry him most are the people who treat others as equipment.
That is why the novel’s tenderness never feels soft-headed. It is built around boundaries. Care is not endless patience. Love is not obedience. Gratitude is not ownership. Friendship, at its best, helps a person see the difference.
Five stars here does not mean the novel is trying to be the darkest horror of the year or the most elaborate fantasy on the shelf. It means Moore knows exactly what book he is making, then makes every part serve it. The Gothic iconography supplies instant myth. The workplace satire gives the myth a fresh social angle. The found-family structure gives the satire emotional stakes. The humour keeps the argument lively. The horror keeps the warmth honest.
Most of all, Moore gives the henchpeople something genre fiction has denied them for generations: not power borrowed from a master, but agency shared with one another.
Turns out the most dangerous thing in the castle was never the lightning.
It was the staff meeting.
Facebook post: What happens when the people carrying the coffins, stitching the bodies and cleaning up after the monsters finally compare notes? Marshall J. Moore’s The Henchperson’s Guide to Unionizing is funny, warm, Gothic and much sharper about power than its comic premise first suggests. Five stars. Full review in the comments.
The Henchperson’s Guide to Unionizing: A Novel by Marshall J. Moore
“Quirky and hilarious but also deep and heartfelt, The Henchperson’s Guide to Unionizing is an unforgettable and fantastic story about being human. I loved it!”—Sarah Beth Durst, New York Times bestselling author of The Spellshop
As the laboratory assistant to the brilliant but demanding Doctor, Igor spends his nights robbing graves, stitching together body parts, and ensuring that his master doesn’t electrocute himself (too badly).
When a mob of peasants wielding torches and pitchforks drives them out of town (again), Igor and the Doctor relocate to the isolated Ravenwald Manor to resume their experiments creating new life from dead flesh. But Igor and the Doctor are not the only ones seeking refuge within the walls of Ravenwald. The manor is already home to a vampiric Count and his highly dissatisfied bride, Cornelia—and an enigmatic witch and her feline familiar, Grimalkin, intend to use it as the site of a magical ritual.
At Igor’s suggestion, the three pairs come to an uneasy agreement to cohabitate in Ravenwald, lest they attract the suspicion of the nearby village. In the wake of this truce, Igor, Cornelia, and Grimalkin soon begin to realize that they might have more common with one another than their respective masters. When the trio discovers that they’ve been unwitting participants in a horrible plan to destroy the world as they know it, they must work together to stop their masters from bringing on armageddon . . . and stop the increasingly suspicious villagers from reaching for their pitchforks and torches.
Igor, Grim, and Cornelia must unite to cast off the chains of their masters and embrace life on their own terms in the hilarious, heartwarming, and just-scary-enough The Henchperson’s Guide to Unionizing.
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