★★★☆☆ A mixed bag

Patreon Year One

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 62 now (July 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 to the CAD 1.50 (CAD=Canadian dollar) level 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 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 six novels of the Incryptid series (that is, through Magic for Nothing) and all the Incryptid short stores listed on McGuire's web site Incryptid Short Stories. I will assume you have, too, in the sense that this review may include spoilers for those works (especially Magic for Nothing). 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 13 works McGuire posted in her first year on Patreon. These are:

Stage of Fools (Tybalt #1), June 2016 Patreon reward
Threnody for Little Girl, With Tuna, at the End of the World, July 2016 Patreon reward.
In Little Stars (Gilad), August 2016 Patreon reward
The Levee Was Dry, September 2016 Patreon reward
The Voice of Lions (Tybalt #2), October 2016 Patreon reward
In the Before, When Legends Were True, November 2016 Patreon reward
Fall Like Snow, December 2016 Patreon reward
The Act of Hares (Tybalt #3), January 2017 Patreon reward
Her Heart Never Came Down Again, February 2017 Patreon reward
Carry On, March 2017 Patreon reward
Magical Girls, bonus March 2017 Patreon reward
The Recitation of the Most Holy and Harrowing Pilgrimage of Mindy and Also Mork (Incryptid story, follows Magic for Nothing), April 2017 Patreon reward
Shore to Shore (Patrick #2), May 2017 Patreon reward

So, these 13 stories are a mixed bag. The bulk of them fall into two groups, (1) stories about fairies (who in the stories refer to themselves as "Sidhe", which is, I gather, Gaelic for fairy, more or less). This group belongs, I believe to the October Daye world. (2) Dystopian/post-apocalyptic stories.

Group (1) is the Three Tybalt stories, the Gilad story, and the Patrick story. Tybalt is king of the Cait Sidhe -- cat fairies. (Apparently he named himself after the character Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, whom Mercutio mocks as "Prince of Cats".) I didn't much like the Tybalt stories. Tybalt is a pompous self-important a--hole. I get that McGuire is trying to give him a cat-like personality, but I love cats, and I dislike Tybalt. There's a lot more Tybalt coming, at least 14 Tybalt stories have been released, so I hope he becomes more sympathetic. Gilad is a Sidhe noble of some sort who has exiled himself to California. Gilad was less dislikable than Tybalt, but he was rather dull. The best in this group was Shore to Shore (Patrick #2). Patrick is a minor Sidhe noble who has made a happy life as an artificer. Apparently Patrick #1 is the free story Heaps of Pearl, which I declined to read because McGuire warns that it contains spoilers for the October Daye series, which I intend someday to read. All one really gleans from Shore to Shore is that Patrick previously met a mermaid called Dianda and promised her ice-cream. She shows up on his doorstep asking for it.

Group (2), the dystopia stories, is Threnody for Little Girl, With Tuna, at the End of the World (what a splendid title!), The Levee Was Dry, Carry On, and possibly (depending on interpretation) In the Before, When Legends Were True, Fall Like Snow, and Her Heart Never Came Down Again. These are all pretty depressing. I often like sad stories, but I didn't really like any of these. They were not so much sad as just dreary.

That leaves Magical Girls and Mindy and Mork. Magical Girls was explained by McGuire as follows: "this is the story Sarah Kuhn, Amber Benson and I wrote for last year's Magical Girls of Urban Fantasy tour. This is the first time it has been made available outside the original tour, where we passed it out as a free chapbook." This is a fun story about three girls who know each other only through the Internet and fandom meeting IRL at a Con for the first time. If you have experienced meeting in person someone you knew only on the net, you probably know it doesn't always go well. But this is in fact a delightful little story.

That leaves only the one Incryptid story in this bunch, Mindy and Mork. You definitely should not read this before Magic for Nothing. And if you've read Magic for Nothing, then you will know what it's going to be about. It's about the journey of the Aeslin mice Mindy and Mork, whom Antimony cut loose at the end of Magic for Nothing to find their own way back to Price home base in Oregon. Besides that, it also tells you about what Sam does after Antimony departs. This is quite a substantial work, virtually a novella.

Summing up, I liked three stories in this group: Shore to Shore, Magical Girls, and The Recitation of the Most Holy and Harrowing Pilgrimage of Mindy and Also Mork. The rest felt rather clumsy to me, as if McGuire were experimenting with new forms and hadn't quite nailed it yet.

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