Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on March 5, 2024 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.
Aftermarket Afterlife is the 13th (not counting a patreon only prequel novel) official novel in Seanan McGuire's urban fantasy series, Incryptid. The series follows the Price/Healy family, who tries to protect cryptids (sentient or non-sentient species whose existence isn't believed by science) from normal unknowing humans...as well as other knowing and more malevolent humans who hunt such cryptids, such as the worldwide organization known as the Covenant of St. George. The series has featured Cryptids from various parts of the world, although is mostly set in North America, and each arc in the series has tended to follow a different member of the family as its first person protagonist. In Aftermarket Afterlife, the series switches its' central character/narrator to Mary, the family's babysitting ghost who used to work for the malevolent supernatural force known as the Crossroads.
And Aftermarket Afterlife is honestly the most grim and devastating novel in the series, as McGuire uses the novel to tie up seeming plot holes and loose ends in ways that take away multiple books' past happy endings...and result in our main protagonists suffering losses like never before. Mary has to deal with not only the fact that there are two new baby/infant members of the family (and that the return of the family grandfather threatens to overturn family harmony) but also a full on attack by the covenant on multiple fronts, such that the lives of her charges and the cryptids and people they care about are in serious danger. The result is a novel where not everyone will make it out alive - and I'm not just talking about the babysitting ghost protagonist - and it is downright brutal. InCryptid is often a series which has had plenty of fun moments even amidst dire danger, and well there's a lot less of that fun here....but the novel works pretty well and moves the series' main arc significantly forward...so I expect we hopefully will have more fun stuff to come in the future.
Spoilers for Books 1-12 are unmarked below:
Plot Summary:
Mary Dunlavy just wanted to take care of her family - even after death. But for decades she has done so at the cost of also working for the malevolent force known as the Crossroads. Now the Crossroads is gone, so all she is a Babysitting (or Caretaker, as she'd prefer to think of it) Ghost, which should make things much easier right? Well, not when that the family she lovingly haunts is the Price Family, whose members (by birth or by adoption) keep putting themselves in danger trying to save all the Cryptids of the World. And right now should be one of her hardest jobs yet, keeping the family together in peaceful harmony as Alice and Thomas Price come home for good (along with adopted child Sally), despite the hatred of their daughter Jane and the mixed feelings of everyone else.
But before the family reunion can really devolve into the chaos everyone expects, something worse begins to happen: the Covenant launches a full on assault on all of the Price Family's allies in North America all at once - whether that be in the dragon's lair in New York, where youngest Price Olivia is residing, or at the Campbell Family Carnival among which several of the Prices grew up. To save them, the Prices will need to be in multiple places at once across the country....and only Mary is capable of zipping in and out at will. But it's a ghostly power that Mary is struggling to use these days without the Crossroads behind her.....
But without Mary's help, the Cryptids of North America...and the Prices themselves may be numbered. And even with her help, Mary may undergo more losses at once than she has ever experienced, a nightmare beyond her greatest imagining. A nightmare that will drive her to go to the limits of her ability and may finally answer the question: what will it take to finally get rid of Mary Dunlavy, Crossroads/Babysitting Ghost, for good?
To be honest, a number of the more recent InCryptid Books have ended on happy endings that haven't really made sense to me. For example, book 2 in the series ended with the heroes using Sarah's power to make Covenant operatives think that there wasn't a need for a purge of New York. But Book 12, Backpacking Through Bedlam, ended with Alice, Thomas and Sally helping to kill off or otherwise dispose of 20 Covenant members in New York, as if that would solve the problem, and just sort of left it at that like it would be a resolution and the Covenant wouldn't send more agents who were even better armed. Book 10, Calculated Risks ended with Sarah accidentally erasing Artie's entire mind in order to get everyone back to our dimension and had her manage to save Artie - and get a happy ending - by telepathically using all of her memories and the memories of others of Artie and putting those into his head to reform his person. But of course a person is more than other's memories of them, so surely this wouldn't actually restore Artie, right? Similarly the end of Antimony's arc had her getting away from the Covenant Scion who wanted to recruit her, but surely he wouldn't be okay with her just getting away?
Aftermarket Afterlife decides that all these "happy" endings weren't real after all and uses that to construct its terrifying conflict. So of course the Covenant isn't done with their attacks and instead launches one with even more overwhelming force across North America, targeting multiple Price Allies at a time. Artie ISN'T restored to his old self by Sarah's actions, and he now goes by Arthur and is clearly not right, without the emotions he often should have, to the discomfort of both his family and he himself. And Leonard Cunningham, the covenant scion who was after Annie, well he's back and still wants her desperately and is willing to do deadly things to get her. In some sense this use of continuity is impressive, but the way it essentially reverses a bunch of happy endings in prior books makes those other books suddenly have a bad taste. Add in the fact that this book doesn't deal with new Cryptid communities or species and that it doesn't really have a lot of the fun humor of other books in the series, and you might expect that I'd really not love this book, as it misses some of my favorite parts of InCryptid.
However, Aftermarket Afterlife still works and it works really really well, despite all of the above and some brutal spoilers I won't go into here (other than to say do not necessarily expect all your favorite characters to get out alive). It helps that Mary's voice comes together really well as she suddenly faces the possible extinction of her own family, whose love is the very reason for her continuing existence, and finds herself drawing deeper and deeper into her power to try to do anything she can to save them. After all she's just a ghost who can't really physically affect the material world too much, what can she really do? Well a lot actually...but she has limits and she runs to and through them in the course of this book...but of course she does, because as the book makes clear in her voice this is who she is, the caretaker of her family. The continuity I mentioned above also works really well, as do the character relationships and whatnot within those continuities, which makes everyone's interactions and reactions work very very well.
And the story end in a way that not only probably ends Mary's arc at one book, but also probably finally gets us into a place where the InCryptid story can move forward from the plot arc that begun way back at the end of book 5 (Chaos Choreography), where the family's biggest focus was dealing with the fact that the Covenant suddenly knew they were still out there and became obsessed with killing them and all of North America's Cryptids. We're not done with the Covenant for sure, but perhaps now we have some breathing room, with such breathing room earned though terrible stakes, and maybe we can get back to the fun stuff in the future. Again, even without much of the fun quirks of this series (and there's a little bit of it here) in this book, it works since I care so much about the characters, and most readers will too if they're 13 books in. But It'd be nice to have a more relaxing lovable dangerous adventure with new Cryptids again, and this book paves the way I think...(Not that McGuire's ability to devastate her long series protagonists should ever be underestimated).
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