★★★☆☆ Good fairy stories, dreary ruin stories, and a John Hughes movie

Patreon Year 3

Seanan McGuire

I will begin by clarifying what I am reviewing here. Seanan McGuire has a Patreon Creator page. Patreon is a website where artists can share their work with subscribers. Subscribers pay a certain amount (usually monthly, but that varies from artist to artist), and in return get access to things ("rewards" in Patreon-speak) that the artist posts on Patreon. "Things" can mean images, videos, or (most relevantly in this case) eBooks. Typically there are multiple reward tiers -- the more you pay, the more you get. McGuire set up her Patreon page in June 2016 and has posted a story every month since then, which makes 63 now (August 2021, when I am writing this), plus a few one-time extras. These "stories" can be pretty substantial literary works. For instance, the reward for July 2021 was a short novel. The way Patreon works, if you subscribe to a tier, you typically get access to everything that was posted for that tier at any time in the past. (In principle an artist could delete past rewards to prevent subscribers from gaming the system, but few of them do that. And in fact, this is a great way to lure in new subscribers. I subscribed in June at the CAD 1.50 level (CAD=Canadian dollar) and in this way immediately got 61 stories.) Most of the stories are posted in MOBI, ePub, and PDF form. MOBI files can be converted for reading on Amazon kindle, and that is how I have read most of these.

I started reading McGuire not long ago after stumbling on Discount Armageddon, the first book in the Incryptid Series. The Incryptid Series consists mainly of novels: ten currently published, with the eleventh due out in March 2022. Although McGuire has a stated intention of making the novels stand on their own, she has also released many Incryptid stories separately. The Incryptid Short Stories page on her web site lists about two dozen of these, some published in anthologies but most available free for download (completely free -- no subscription required). This list does not include the Patreon stories. In addition to the Incryptid Series, McGuire is best known for another series, October Daye. She also has a page of October Daye short stories on her web site.

I have read the first eight novels of the Incryptid series (that is, through That Ain’t Witchcraft) and all the Incryptid short stories listed on McGuire's web site Incryptid Short Stories and the 25 stories posted in her first two years on Patreon (June 2016 - May 2018). I will assume you have, too, in the sense that this review may include spoilers for those works. Aside from Patreon stories, I have not read any October Daye works, so you're fairly safe from spoilers on those. I will try to avoid spoilers for the works I am reviewing here, which are the 12 works McGuire posted in her third year on Patreon. These are:

Jealous in Honor (Tybalt #7), June 2018 Patreon reward
Harvest, July 2018 Patreon reward
Quick in Quarrel (Tybalt #8), August 2018 Patreon reward
File and Forget, September 2018 Patreon reward
The Ambitious Ocean (Patrick #5), October 2018 Patreon reward
Love in the Last Days of a Doomed World, November 2018 Patreon reward
And Thrice Again (Simon #1), December 2018 Patreon reward
Sweet as Sugar Candy, January 2019 Patreon reward
On The Side, February 2019 Patreon reward
Emergency Landing, March 2019 Patreon reward
Of Strange Oaths (Tybalt #9), April 2019 Patreon reward
Vegetables and Vaccines, May 2019 Patreon reward

We have here five stories from the October Daye continuity -- those would be the three Tybalt stories, the Simon story, and the Patrick story. These were better than I expected. In previous Patreon stories I didn't like Tybalt. He's a pompous, wordy a--hole. But the Year 3 Tybalt stories are better. They recount the momentous consequences of actions Tybalt took in Patreon Year 2 stories. They are well plotted and left me intrigued to learn what happens next.

That leaves us (among the October Daye stories) with the Simon and Patrick stories. I like Patrick a lot, he and his mermaid love Dianda are charming in an unassuming way -- they're just good people, even if they are fairy nobility. In The Ambitious Ocean Patrick walks knowingly into danger to defend his right to court Dianda. He bites off more than he can chew but is rescued by friends. One of those friends, Simon Torquill, is the subject of And Thrice Again. This story was a little surprising to me. I had previously known Simon only as Patrick's easy-going friend. Patrick thinks of Simon as a slacker. In this story we see a much more serious, high-stakes side to Simon. (Perhaps this would be less surprising to someone who had read the October Daye books, which, I gather, are centered on the Torquill family.) So that was good.

Then we have what I will call "ruin stories". When she released Sweet as Sugar Candy, McGuire explained, "Sometimes I ask my friends what they want me to ruin for my patrons. This month, my friend Carrie said 'please ruin marshmallows.'" There are three more ruin stories in this batch: On The Side, Emergency Landing, Vegetables and Vaccines. Also, although she explains them differently, Love in the Last Days of a Doomed World and File and Forget feel like ruin stories. So that makes six. The ruin stories are mostly about about a sort of apocalypse -- a future where something connected with the thing to be ruined has gone badly wrong. These are very on-brand for McGuire. She is not a safe writer -- you can't count on happy endings, or on the people you love surviving intact. Alas, I can't say I really enjoy the ruin stories so much. Too often they are just gray and dreary. In this collection several of the ruin stories (I won't say which ones) have sort-of happy endings. (Under a very generous understanding of "happy ending".)

That leaves us with Harvest. Harvest is ostensibly a story about fairies, but not really. Really, it's a John Hughes movie in short story form, and is about a high-school dance. The high-school student characters happen to be mostly fairies, but that is not really important. Like a John Hughes movie, it's a fun story about kids finding love (or some acceptable facsimile). I certainly enjoyed it.

Comments

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