On reading Seanan McGuire.

Seanan McGuire

Seanan McGuire is one of my recent favorite authors. She is an astonishingly prolific writer of Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror. She publishes under three names: Seanan McGuire, Mira Grant, and A Deborah Baker. (That I know of. Nothing would surprise me less than to learn that she has another pseudonym or two squirrelled away somewhere.) She has published over two hundred works of fiction: novels, novellas, and short stories. Most of her longer fiction is published by well-known publishers of speculative fiction, e.g. Tor/Forge. However, much of her shorter fiction is given away for free on her website and LiveJournal, or almost for free on her Patreon page.

She reminds me a bit of Isaac Asimov, who once wrote,

I am not a compulsive writer. It is just that, when I'm not writing, I want to be.

That is the feeling I get from McGuire. Although she earns her living by writing, she writes because she can't help it. If she can't sell it, she gives it away.

For the last several months I have untaken a project of reading all McGuire's published fiction. (I specify fiction because I have not read Letters to the Pumpkin King and do not intend to.) Last night I completed this project. It is possible that I have missed some of her works. In fact, I would be astonished if I found everything. But there is no published McGuire fiction I know of, after diligent search, that I have not read.

This was, of course, a big project, and at times tedious. Like all highly prolific authors, McGuire produces output of varying quality. I believe an artist should be judged by their best work, not the average, and thus I judge McGuire to be an excellent author. Her best works are, in my opinion, those she published as Seanan McGuire. The majority of her work is published in or connected to the following series.

October Daye -- her longest running series -- the first novel, Rosemary and Rue, was her first published novel and book 16, Be the Serpent was just published 30-Aug-2022.

Incryptid

Ghost Roads (Incryptid universe)

These are listed roughly in order of decreasing literary quality. (In my opinion, of course, which is likely to differ substantially from yours.) For details, follow those links to the series pages. From there you can, if you wish, find my (and everyone else's) reviews. In addition to the works published as books, there are hundreds of stories connected to these series by characters and world-building. I would not say that you fully appreciate these works without reading the body of connected stories -- this is particularly true for the Incryptid stories. There are also works not connected to these series, for instance the short story collection Laughter at the Academy or the free-standing ghost story Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day.

Here is the Mira Grant biosketch:

Mira also writes as Seanan McGuire.

Born and raised in Northern California, Mira Grant has made a lifelong study of horror movies, horrible viruses, and the inevitable threat of the living dead. In college, she was voted Most Likely to Summon Something Horrible in the Cornfield, and was a founding member of the Horror Movie Sleep-Away Survival Camp, where her record for time survived in the Swamp Cannibals scenario remains unchallenged.

Mira lives in a crumbling farmhouse with an assortment of cats, horror movies, comics, and books about horrible diseases. When not writing, she splits her time between travel, auditing college virology courses, and watching more horror movies than is strictly good for you. Favorite vacation spots include Seattle, London, and a large haunted corn maze just outside of Huntsville, Alabama.

Mira sleeps with a machete under her bed, and highly suggests that you do the same.

This makes it pretty obvious that Mira Grant is Seanan McGuire's horror brand. The main Mira Grant series are

Rolling in the Deep

Newsflesh

Parasitology

There are also a bunch of unconnected Mira Grant novellas and stories. The Mira Grant oeuvre is, in my opinion, of distinctly lower quality than the works published as Seanan McGuire. In fact, when I'm feeling uncharitable (pretty much my default state) I tend to think of Mira Grant as "Seanan McGuire's toxic waste dump".

That leaves us with A Deborah Baker. A Deborah Baker is a fictional character in the Alchemical Journeys series. She (Baker) was a 19th-century alchemist who conceived a plan to rule the world, as one does. This plan involved her becoming inconveniently dead (possibly only temporarily). She thus wrote a series of books:

The Up and Under

to perpetuate her influence through the time when she expected to be dead. McGuire then went ahead and actually wrote those books. (To be exact, she has published two, and the third is coming out in just three weeks, on 25-Oct-2022.) Although these are literally books written by Seanan McGuire, they are better understood as bools written by the fictional character A Deborah Baker. They are, alas, in my opinion, not especially good books.

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