Halfway Through The Wood is one of the more unusual things I've reviewed on this blog, because while it's definitely a short novel, it's not available for direct purchase - it's a reward on Seanan Mcguire's Patreon. In essence, it costs $1 for this novel - since that's how much you need to pay for McGuire's Patreon to get access to it - and all the other stories on her Patreon. So I'm going to treat it like any other book I review honestly.
Of course, like a large amount of the stories on McGuire's Patreon, Halfway Through the Wood is not stand alone, but rather is the end of an arc of prequel stories - the Alice and Thomas stories - in McGuire's urban fantasy InCryptid universe - so it's not something that can be read without any knowledge of the InCryptid universe...and probably shouldn't be read without reading the rest of the Alice/Thomas stories first.* But as someone who has loved InCryptid, and has really enjoyed getting to know Alice/Thomas, I dropped the book I was already reading to devour this the moment McGuire released it on Patreon. And wow was it good, if as heartbreaking as some of McGuire's other works....
*The next published novel in the InCryptid series, Spelunking Through Hell, is featuring Alice in the present day, as she searches for Thomas, so McGuire produced this novella as the capper to this prequel storyline, even if not the end of Alice/Thomas' prequel stories, to setup that novel.
Quick Plot Summary: Alice is near the end of her childhood, turning 18 soon and facing the next turning point in her life - going to college or staying in Buckley - when disaster strikes....and Enid Healy is found dead in the Healy house kitchen, body melted by an unknown source. Now the family must grieve, as the one person holding them altogether as Jonathan, Alexander, Thomas and Alice clash over Alice's future, and a community of Cryptids helped and held together by Enid remember her one last time.
But the killer of Enid is still out there, and threatens more in the community if it isn't stopped. But with one Healy dead already, can Thomas and the Healys stop it before it takes another one of them...like Alice, the girl who can't be kept from the forest she loves even if it kills her?
Thoughts: Damn. I should have expected some of this - as readers of the InCryptid series will have an idea that certain things have to happen (these are prequel stories after all) - but wow is this a tremendous next installment in the Alice/Thomas series that ends on a brutal note. And that's for a story that starts with a death of a major character, so that's saying something.
Still, even knowing what had to happen to some extent, McGuire's storytelling is masterful here, as what we were building up to in the Alice/Thomas stories came to fruition to a certain extent: the tension between Alice and her father, the growing romantic feelings on Thomas' part towards Alice (who has always had a Crush), the specter of the Crossroads over their relationship (which we know from the main series must come into play)....all of that comes in here - together with a celebration of what Enid Healy, who we've come to know first from the Fran/Jonathan stories and then from the Alice/Thomas stories. McGuire takes a character who we've only known on the side and makes her death truly memorable, even as we don't actually see it happen on-page, just from the memories she has made.
If you aren't a fan of InCryptid, and haven't been following the prequel stories, I don't think Halfway Through the Wood will be for you - you will not care about the characters, whose development elsewhere leads to everything here. But if you have been keeping up, and if you have, you have been reading some really fun, enjoyable and lovely stories, this is a truly special capper to an arc, that makes McGuire's Patreon well well worth the price of admission.
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