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October brings out our inner gremlins, so we leaned in and built a creature-feature lineup for the month that blends romance with folklore, small-town politics, and the kind of magical logic that feels like a warm drink on a cold night.
We start with a confession: we almost recorded the whole episode of Season 2 Episode 21 without hitting record. That human glitch sets the tone. This episode is messy, warm, and full of laughs. Our drinks match the mood: a bourbon-infused “I Put a Spell on You” nods to witches, while an adult Shirley Temple ties into a character’s tender moment of recovery. These aren’t just beverages. They’re scene-setters for stories about care, comfort, and the rituals we use to cope with grief, regret, and the burden of memory. As the laughter settles, the deeper threads emerge: what we choose to remember, what we’d rather forget, and how love changes our understanding of both.
Nicole Danielle’s Book: In the Shadow Garden by Liz Parker
Our first deep dive lands in Yarrow, Kentucky, where a family of witches tends a shadow garden fed by pain and sadness. The premise feels grounded and eerie at once. Townsfolk drink enchanted bourbon and willingly drop a single unwanted memory — until one year, an entire summer vanishes. That lost summer of 1997 (the year Meghan and Nicole graduated from high school, BTW) becomes the story’s gravitational pull.
The town’s collective amnesia raises quiet, unsettling questions. Who benefits from forgetting, and at what cost does a community choose peace over truth? The Haywood women — grandmother, mother, daughter — offer three lenses on legacy and power. The matriarch protects, the mother mediates, and the daughter, struggling with unruly magic, longs to help but can’t quite control the outcomes.
Meanwhile, the rival Bonners embody generational grievance: industry, pride, and a practiced capacity to turn magic into money. What hooked us wasn’t just the Hatfield-and-McCoy cadence of the feud but the way the garden’s health mirrors the town’s moral ecosystem. When the garden starves, the bourbon falters, and the town’s rituals start to ring hollow. It reads like an ecological fable about emotional labor — who absorbs communal pain, and how families metabolize harm into care.
The narrative’s slow build pays off with nuance: closed-door intimacy, subtle sparks, and multiple slow burns that prioritize emotional stakes over spectacle. The puzzle pieces — Addison’s mistakes, Kaden’s fractured past, the garden’s hunger — click together in a final act that rewards patient readers. We talk about pacing, character webs, and why the Practical Magic vibe works here. The spells are intimate, domestic, and purposeful. Tea leaves, custom blends, humble rituals — these details frame magic as caregiving. There’s beauty in that framing. It makes memory work feel tactile. We also draw a line from magical corn to community complicity. If bourbon offers an easy purge of pain, then forgetting can become a civic habit. The book dares the town to unspool the truth anyway. It’s a thoughtful angle on forgiveness that never slides into sentimentality.
Meghan Leigh’s Book: I’m in Love with Mothman by Paige Lavoie
Then we pivot into Mothman territory. Our guide is a burned-out beauty influencer who buys a rural cabin in Point Pleasant, West Virginia to escape the churn of comments, clout, and a PR crisis. The setup is delicious: forced proximity with a winged legend who is alternately fearsome and gentle, grumpy and observant.
The meet-cute is slapstick and sweet — a tree, a long skirt, and an airborne rescue. And what follows is part Beauty-and-the-Beast, part small-town healing. The charm isn’t just in the monster romance tropes. It’s in the quiet acts of attention. Mothman notices her medications. He orders gluten-free so he can share his food with her. He draws a bath and braids her hair. These gestures are the antidote to her public life, where everything is performance and nothing is private.
The romance builds around consent, care, and two characters misread by their audiences. We laugh about genre quirks — sudden smirks, cinematic teleporting into each other’s arms, and the perennial problem of exaggerated anatomy. But we also underline why this story works: it treats tenderness like a plot engine, not a garnish.
Tying It All Together
Across both books, a theme emerges: intimacy as presence, not rescue. The Kentucky witches absorb others’ pain at great personal cost. Our romantic reminder is to sit & listen with loved ones rather than try to fix them. The Mothman’s love language is attention — seeing needs before they turn into emergencies. These stories parse “monster” as a social construct: a family entangled in a generations-old feud, a myth painted as menace, an influencer flattened by a brand. Each character claws back personhood through small, consistent acts. From a reader’s standpoint, the spice scales diverge — closed-door green pepper in Yarrow, and jalapeño in Point Pleasant. But the emotional heat feels aligned. Both reward those who come for heart over shock value.
Have you read either of these paranormal romances? What did you think of them? Comment below! We’d love to hear from you. Interested in reading these novels yourself? You can purchase In the Shadow Garden from The Ripped Bodice here or Amazon here. I’m in Love with Mothman can be scored via Amazon here or The Ripped Bodice here. To learn more about romance writer Liz Parker, click here. And to learn more about author Paige Lavoie, click here. Want to listen to the podcast episode? We’re available on pretty much all your favorite podcast streaming services. Or you can visit our podcast player page here.
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