Monday, February 14, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Spelunking Through Hell by Seanan McGuire

 



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 1, 2022 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.

Spelunking Through Hell is the eleventh* novel in Seanan McGuire's second urban fantasy series, InCryptid.  For those who don't know the series, it follows the Price/Healy family, a family of cryptozoologists as they try to protect the Cryptids of North America, the creatures sciences says couldn't really exist, from human intervention, such as that of the Covenant of Saint George (which hunts them as "monsters").   The series features a bunch of short stories set in various past generations of the family and then a series of novels dealing with the present generation (mainly), with each book/arc featuring a different Price as the narrating main character.  

*Technically McGuire released a short prequel novel a few months back on her Patreon in this series, Halfway through the Wood (which I reviewed here), but I'm not counting that as it's not a mainline entry.*

The result is an urban fantasy series that is incredibly fun and enjoyable, with the interactions between the usually human protagonists and the various cryptid species and peoples they interact with keeping up a good bit of variety (and then there's magic-users and other strange things as well), especially as each new protagonist narrator has very different perspectives and character struggles.  So yeah I love this series and I was psyched to get an early copy of the latest volume.  

Spelunking Through Hell is an oddball installment of the series - it's a single novel arc featuring not one of the latest Price generation, but Alice Price-Healy, the current family's kind of insane grandma, who has magically kept resetting her age as she hunts through different dimensions for her lost husband Thomas.  But Alice is highly entertaining - not to mention deadly - as she goes through different dimensions with different peoples, even as the book makes clear quite quickly that something isn't quite right with her in a way that even she doesn't realize (and well she knows she's quite broken).  I've really loved reading the short stories featuring Alice and Thomas 50 years in the past, and so I was really excited to read adult Alice, to see her finally find Tommy and to see how they would react after everything that had happened.  And I was not disappointed.  
------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
50 years ago, when Alice Price was pregnant with her second child, her husband Thomas was taken away by the Crossroads and banished to some other dimension.  Only the health of her unborn child kept Alice from following right after him, and as soon as her child Jane was born, Alice pawned Jane and her son Kevin off on her best friend Laura and began chasing after Thomas.

50 years later, Alice Price-Healy has gone places no human from Earth has gone before - or should EVER go in the first place, as she's hunted through countless dimensions for her husband.  She's used unspeakably painful magic to keep her health and youth to keep searching and, has even taken on a side job as an interdimensional bounty hunter to keep her busy along the way.  But the one thing she hasn't found is Thomas, even after all these years.  

But things have changed - most notably, Alice's granddaughter has destroyed the Crossroads, meaning the force that once took her husband away is now gone.  And when a bit of luck provides Alice with the lead on her husband that she never dreamed of finding, Alice gets ready to embark on her most dangerous journey yet.  For return from this journey might be impossible, even if Alice finds Thomas....and who knows what he will be like after 50 years, assuming he's still alive.......
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Alice Price-Healy has been one of the InCryptid series' greatest mysteries since the beginning - a woman who should be in her 80s, but who has somehow found a way, in between dimensional traveling, to repeatedly reverse her aging, such that she always looks like she's in her late teens or 20s - and has never quite been willing to say how she's accomplishing that.  What happened to her husband Thomas has been slowly revealed over the short stories, but whether he'd be alive in the present has always been in question (although Seanan McGuire doesn't really do super depressing endings in her non-horror work, so spoiler alert: he is).  And when we have seen Alice on page in the present day, she's always been incredibly trigger happy and reckless, willing to blow things up seemingly on a moment's notice, and more than a little bit unstable.  So seeing her carry a book was always going to be interesting.

And it is VERY interesting.  While Alice has always been portrayed in prior present stories as a bit crazy and oblivious to that fact, this book makes it clear that's quite the opposite: Alice is very very aware that she's a broken woman, who has screwed up her chances at a happy life with her family for her 50 year search for her husband.  She's endured terrible pain, and made some horrible choices - to the point where it's very easy for an "ally" of hers to clearly be manipulating her (something that's incredibly obvious to the reader from the narration) without her noticing, because she can't tell those feelings that something is wrong from her otherwise common paranoia - among other reasons.  But broken though she may be, she will do absolutely ANYTHING to find her husband, no matter how dangerous, and her recklessness makes even the previously most reckless Price member (Antimony) seem levelheaded.  

This makes her a lot of fun to read, and McGuire does an excellent job here in creating a fun environment in the multiversal - well multi dimensional - space for Alice to adventure in, as she goes from one dimension to another, each with its own strange creatures and denizens, to try and find her way to Thomas.  The last time the series switched dimensions, the last book Calculated Risks, it kind of felt a bit off, as the new dimension wasn't really that interesting with its Cryptid species, which are really the draw of this series (well that and the Mice).  Here, Alice's travels give us a wide variety of different encounters, dangerous and otherwise, and Alice's reckless treatment of her own health makes those encounters fun and interesting.  

And so we have a book that deals with a character who is incredibly broken, going on one final crazy reckless adventure to get what she needs, and coming away in it all with happiness, with some really fun and crazy surprises along the way (we meet one character referenced previously who is far more entertaining and enjoyable than I could've hoped).  You certainly can't start the series here, but if you were considering whether you wanted to start the InCryptid series at any point (and there's two very good entry points in books 1 and 3), this book should only further give you incentive to do so.

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