Wednesday, December 20, 2017

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Chaos Choreography (inCryptid) by Seanan McGuire





Chaos Choreography is the fifth inCryptid novel, but resides in an odd place in terms of it's potential to be read as the first in the series.  Both Books 1 (Discount Armageddon) and 3 (Half-Off Ragnarok) are the starts of arcs centered around different characters and thus can be used as a new reader's introduction to the series  By contrast, Chaos Choreography returns after a two book absence to Verity Price (the protagonist of Book 1), even if it takes place in a different city, and thus kind of serves as a third book in an already completed plot arc (and a continuation of that plot arc in some ways can be found in a bunch of fun short stories on McGuire's website).

This wouldn't matter too much if this was a stronger book - but for reasons I'll lay out after the jump, Chaos Choreography is the weakest inCryptid novel.  It's still a well-paced read with several fun moments (despite you know, people being horribly murdered).  But it feels oddly duplicative of the first book in the series, Discount Armageddon, even though it ends in a way to set up a drastically new status quo for the series.



--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
Years ago, Valerie Pryor competed on the hit National reality show, "Dance or Die," where her ballroom dancing won the hearts of America.....until she came up just short of winning at the finale.  For a normal dancer that would've been the thing to start one's career....except Valerie Pryor doesn't exist - she was simply an alias for Verity Price, a member of the cryptozoologist Price-Healy family that has spent the past five generations living in hiding while trying to protect and preserve North America's cryptid populations.   Verity still loved dance, and tried to see if she could make it work, but after her encounters with a strike team of the monster-hunting Covenant of St. George in New York, she knew she couldn't deny her calling to be the latest cryptozoologist of the family.  Of course, she did manage to get a husband out of that horrible experience in the ex-Covenant agent Dominic de Luca.

But when Verity receives an email from the producers of Dance or Die asking if she would return to the show for an All-Star Season, she couldn't pass up the chance.  And so Valerie Pryor is reborn.  But when two eliminated contestants are found dead in the fashion of a ritual slaughter, it seems the worlds of Valerie and Verity won't stay so neatly apart this time.  If Verity can't figure out who is doing the killing and stop them, things could get very very bad.

Fortunately, Verity has support not only from Dominic this time, but her Dimensionally-Traveling Heavily-Armed grandmother Alice Price-Healy.  Well, perhaps "fortunately" isn't the right word to describe help from a crazy woman who looks in her 20s and whose idea of a welcome is to lob a grenade.....
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Chaos Choreography returns to the first person point of view of Verity Price, our narrator for the first two inCryptid Novels.  That said, we're no longer following her in New York - this story takes place ostensibly in Los Angeles, where the reality competition takes place.  Verity is still a fun character to follow, as is her husband Dominic (who surprisingly gets a smaller part than you'd think).  And Grandma Alice, previously only referenced in the novels (and whose short stories so far take place early enough in her life to not really give us a good impression of who she would become) is a fun new character to add to the party.

Still this story almost feels more like one of the inCryptid short stories than a novel - even though it's novel length.  There's no reason why this book is set in L.A. - it could've been set in any other city, unlike the first two inCryptid novels which do take advantage of being set in Manhattan.  The story is more direct than the prior inCryptid novels (or at least it feels that way), with the climax occurring and resolving extremely quickly.  I enjoy those inCryptid short stories a lot, because the characters are generally very fun, but it's weird to feel that same format in novel length.

Really though, the problem with this book is that it feels like it isn't doing anything new.  For the second time in three books, our villain for Verity is a Snake Cult that's killing people.  The book attempts to set up THIS Snake Cult as being far more dangerous because it actually knows what it's doing, but the climax is so quick that it never really feels like it's more dangerous than Discount Armageddon's snake cult at all.  We've been here done that with all of this, and the "mystery" element of who is behind the Snake Cult isn't really done well enough (two of the culprits are obvious; the third doesn't seem to leave any clues behind) to make a difference.

The story does end with a major change to the status quo of the series, which portends a new era for the series going forward.  But does that major change really justify the rest of the book? Not really.  Again, the book isn't bad - like the rest of the series, it's a fun well-paced ride.  But it's a low point for the series nonetheless.

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