Stories with Teeth

Something Is Blooming

What is opening in the dark this season.

Therapy Can Be Murder

Poison Chef · Book One

October 20, 2026

Clara Hastings has two Michelin-starred restaurants, expensive taste, questionable judgment, and six distinct voices sharing space in her head.

Then her therapist turns up dead.

Not merely dead, either. He has been arranged in a scene disturbingly close to one Clara once imagined aloud in therapy.

Which creates a problem.

Someone may be using the contents of Clara’s own mind to frame her. Or Clara may have done something she cannot remember.

Either way, dinner service is going to be awkward.

Therapy Can Be Murder is a darkly funny psychological mystery about fractured identity, unreliable memory, dangerous secrets, and one very talented chef who would greatly prefer not to discover that murder is among her hidden skills.

Buy the Kindle edition — $6.99

Paperback arrives October 20, 2026.

Read It Before Everyone Else

Advance copies are available now, and the useful window is now — the book publishes on 20 October, and a review that arrives before that date does more good than one that arrives after.

If you review books on Amazon, Goodreads, StoryGraph, your own site, social media, or anywhere readers gather, you can request an advance copy here:

storyoriginapp.com/reviewcopies/01a078ae-d178-7ed4-9640-e6b8a1329c5e

No required enthusiasm. No fishing for stars.

We would much rather have an honest reader than a polite one.

Every Book Has a Beginning

How Poison Chef started.

From RGB Gray

I did not want Clara Hastings to be admirable all the time. Frankly, I wasn’t even interested in trying.

I wanted a heroine who was brilliant and vain. Disciplined and self-destructive. Funny, fragile, sensual, maddening, generous in unexpected places, and spectacularly attracted to some of the worst possible choices.

In other words, human.

Clara can command a Michelin-starred kitchen with terrifying precision and still have absolutely no idea what to do with herself.

That interested me.

Then another question arrived: what happens when the person you are depending on to help heal you turns up dead—and you are the first suspect?

How does someone who already struggles to trust herself prove she is innocent? And what happens when the evidence begins to make innocence harder to believe?

That was the seed.

The rest became Therapy Can Be Murder.

The World Is Still Strange

Forests that float. Facts that refuse to behave.

The Island That Wouldn’t Stay Put

This summer, a boater on Williston Lake in British Columbia encountered something that should not have been there.

A forest. Floating.

Not a handful of weeds or a drifting logjam, but an enormous mass of vegetation carrying trees—nearly the size of two football fields—moving across the lake like an island that had quietly decided geography was optional.

And then it disappeared from where it had been seen.

Two weeks later they found it again, twenty miles away. It had sailed thirty kilometres while nobody was watching.

There are scientific explanations for how enormous mats of roots, soil, peat, and vegetation can tear loose and become buoyant. That explanation does not make the image any less wonderful.

A person went out onto a familiar lake and found a forest sailing through it.

Mystery is not the absence of an answer. Sometimes it is simply the glorious moment before the answer arrives.

Always Look Up

The same sky, from the same garden, every month.

September 26, 2026

The Harvest Moon rises with Saturn nearby, and Saturn will be visible to the naked eye — lower left of the moon, less than a hand’s width away, about an hour after it rises.

Scientists have just identified an enormous ten-sided atmospheric wave circling Saturn’s south polar region. A decagon. Saturn was apparently unsatisfied with possessing the famous six-sided hexagon at its north pole.

So sometime after sunset on 26 September, go outside. Find the Moon. Find Saturn.

The more we learn, the stranger and more magical the world becomes. Nothing stays still for long.

Nourishing the Whole Human

What we eat, what we believe, and how we survive ourselves.

Black Petal Press is also home to two nonfiction newsletters. They ask different questions from the novels, but perhaps not entirely different ones.

How to Survive Being Human — emotional healing, consciousness, identity, spirituality, reincarnation, purpose, and the complicated business of being a person who is trying to become slightly wiser without becoming unbearable about it.

Sacred Nourishment — ancient traditions, modern nutrition, gut health, healing foods, cultural recipes, and practical ways to eat beautifully without requiring a private chef or a private fortune. The current series turns toward Breakfast for Vibrancy & Energy.

Because transcendence is lovely, but it helps to eat first.

More Books Like This One

A table of books left out in the garden. Take one.

From 13 September through 16 October, Therapy Can Be Murder is joining a handpicked collection of atmospheric mysteries, uncanny fiction, gothic suspense, supernatural intrigue, and dark speculative stories offering advance copies to reviewers.

These are books for readers who like their mysteries shadowed, their discoveries unsettling, and their ordinary worlds just a little bit wrong.

If your shelves lean toward gothic suspense, supernatural mystery, folk-horror-adjacent fiction, or dark stories with something strange moving beneath the surface, this collection was made for you.

Browse the full ARC collection here:

storyoriginapp.com/bundles/01a058b4-457e-727d-a9a7-d18b4f9e5722

Reviews are warmly encouraged, never required.