The Henchperson's Guide to Unionizing

by Marshall J. Moore

Genres: Fantasy; Humorous Fantasy; General Fiction; Friendship; Horror

Synopsis

“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

The stunning first edition paperback of The Henchperson’s Guide to Unionizing features stenciled edges depicting a character from the book—order while supplies last!

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.

Release date: September 22, 2026

Publisher: Bantam

Print pages: 384

Sample

1

It’s Alive

In Igor’s considerable experience, the Subject was one of the finest corpses he had ever assembled.

It lay upon the great stone slab which dominated the tower room that Igor’s master had converted into his laboratory. Naked save for the sheet draped across its lower regions, the Subject was better than six feet of stiff muscles and ever-­so-­slightly mismatched limbs. Igor had done his best to pair them, but if there was one thing that his long and informal study of anatomy had taught him, it was that virtually no two human beings were exact matches for one another.

The natural exceptions, of course, being twins, but, as the Doctor had despairingly remarked upon more than one occasion, twins rarely had the decency to leave the world in as synchronized a fashion as they had entered it. So, like many other craftsmen, Igor had done his best with the materials available.

At least the stitches were scarcely visible. No one would ever accuse the short, hunchbacked manservant limping around the Subject’s slab of an overabundance of grace, but Igor was a deft hand with a needle. One would have to look closely to distinguish the fine dotted lines demarking where the Subject had been opened up to install a fresher set of organs than those it had been buried with.

“Is the Subject ready, Igor?” the Doctor called from the upper floor of the laboratory, where he stood perusing the collection of arcane schematics and anatomical diagrams scattered across his worktable one final time. Behind him, conical electrical conductors towered like monoliths reaching towards the open sky above.

“Almost, Master!” Igor shouted, just as a lightning flash bathed the world in stark white, a tremendous thunderclap drowning out his reply. Igor blinked rapidly to clear his vision of the lightning’s afterimages.

“Answer me when I ask you a question!” the Doctor yelled.

“Sorry, Master.” Igor rounded the end of the table, inspecting the Subject one last time before the experiment truly began. Not for the first time, he caught himself envying the smooth muscles of its calves, one of which had once belonged to a champion distance runner. Igor’s own legs were considerably more mismatched than those of the grafted-­together corpse, one being nearly two inches longer than the other. This combined with his humped back to give him an ungainly, shuffling gait that was never quite fast enough to appease his master’s limited patience. “Nearly ready. Just have to insert the—­”

“The brain, Igor!” The Doctor jabbed a gloved finger at the corpse. The upper hemisphere of its skull hinged open at the occipital bone, exposing an empty cranium. “Maybe you can function without one, you cretin, but I hardly expect the ideal specimen of mankind to do the same. Do you?”

“No, Master!” Igor said, already heading for the great oak doors of the laboratory. He knew better than to take his master’s insults personally. Like most geniuses, the Doctor was possessed of a mercurial temperament, his agitation inevitably growing the nearer he drew to an experiment’s completion.

Grunting, Igor pushed open the heavy doors and hurried down the spiral staircase as swiftly as his shuffling gait permitted. Not for the first time, he silently bemoaned whatever wisdom or caprice had led his master to settle them in a ruined castle. An abandoned church would have been more to Igor’s liking. They’d set up the laboratory in several of those down the years, and Igor had always enjoyed the way sound echoed and magnified in such spaces, how the broken panes of stained glass bathed the dusty floors in strange and wonderful colors.

Best of all, none of them had as many stairs as this accursed castle.

“Master knows what he’s doing,” Igor consoled himself, coming at last to the landing where the tower joined the ruined castle’s keep. Safely out of his master’s sight, Igor leaned against the nearest windowsill, listening to the rain pattering against the glass as he caught his breath. Just for a minute, he told himself.

Then it was back to work.

Another lightning flash, followed by a thunderclap that rattled the windowpanes. Igor peered out, hoping he might glimpse the next lightning bolt to go arcing through the sky.

Instead, a distant line of tiny lights came flickering in and out of sight along the steep and winding mountain path leading to the castle. Even from this distance and through the rain, there was no mistaking the dancing red and yellow flames.

Torches.

“Pitchforks too, I shouldn’t wonder,” Igor muttered, turning from the window and hurrying towards the stairs leading down to the dungeons.

Time was of the essence now.

***

At some point prior to the castle’s abandonment but comfortably after the fortification had ceased to be of any military value, its owner had decided that its dungeons would better serve as a wine cellar. They were cool and dark, ideal for the storage of rare vintages—­or laboratory materials sensitive to heat and light.

Igor hobbled down rows of shelves bearing labels like chianti and merlot, though most had been crossed out and replaced with Igor’s untidy scrawl. Dexterous though he was with needle and thread, his handwriting remained scarcely legible. He passed livers and teeth, crossed into the aisle for skulls (partial), then slipped into the row he was searching for.

“Brains,” Igor said aloud, licking his lips as he surveyed the rows of glass jars before him, each containing a lump of gray matter floating in a briny alchemical solution of the Doctor’s own devising.

Under better circumstances, Igor would have been more circumspect in his selection, but neither the raging storm nor the angry mob making their inexorable way up the mountain permitted him the luxury of time. He plucked up the nearest brain: tax collector.

“Pristine condition.” Igor tucked the jar safely under his arm. Patting its lid, he hurried out of the cellar and up the stairs as swiftly as his legs could carry him.

***

“Master!” Igor cried, the oak doors of the laboratory groaning with impressive vibrato as he pushed them open. “There’s an angry mob coming!”

“When isn’t there?” the Doctor muttered. “They’ve torches and pitchforks, I suppose?”

“Farming implements of every description,” Igor confirmed, having taken another breather on the landing as he climbed the stairs, where, through the window, he’d seen the mob reach the top of the mountain. In moments they would be hammering on the castle’s front gate, which Igor doubted would hold for long under a sustained assault.

“Plebeians and luddites,” the Doctor sneered, pushing his shock of bone-­white hair back from his face. “Far be it from us to let such simpletons stand in the way of scientific progress. The brain?”

“Here, Master.” Igor indicated the jar. “You mean to continue the experiment, then?”

“Of course I do,” the Doctor snapped, rounding his worktable. “It’ll take more than a gaggle of illiterate peasants to keep me from realizing my vision. Not when the completion of the Great Work is so near to hand, Nature’s fundamental secrets laid bare before my—­”

The remainder of the Doctor’s monologue was cut short when he stepped on one of the numerous discarded glass vials littering the laboratory floor. His lanky arms flailed as his feet went out from under him. Igor started towards his master but had gone only a few shuffling steps when the Doctor caught himself on the worktable railing. He slowly straightened, lips curled downwards with the expression of a man trying to resurrect his dignity after discovering that his trousers had been unbuttoned all morning.

“It’s an awfully large angry mob, Master,” Igor said, taking advantage of the interruption. Were the Doctor permitted to resume his former line of self-­indulgent thought, Igor would never be afforded the opportunity to get a word in edgewise. “A hundred, from the looks of it. Possibly more.”