★★★☆☆ Ghosts and grief

Installment Immortality

Seanan Mcguire

I read Seanan McGuire's Discount Armageddon in May, 2021. It was the first book by McGuire I had ever read, and I was immediately hooked. It was full of life, and so funny! The Aeslin mice alone were worth the price. I subsequently went on to read every extant Incryptid novel and story, as well as McGuire's Octboer Daye series, and eventually every work of fiction she's published that I could find.

The first two thirds of Installment Immortality are puzzling. They do all the obvious, concrete things right. The characters are well-drawn and interesting. This is the second Incryptid novel focused on Mary Dunlavy, who has long been one of my favorite Incryptid characters. The plot is intricate, complicated and unpredictable enough to be interesting, and yet not so complicated as to be difficult to follow. It continues the old Price Family vs Covenant of St George conflict that is a through line of the series.

And yet, I had the strangest feeling. The story just seemed to lie there, dead, on the page. All that life and humor I had come to depend on in the Incryptid novels was just missing. The Aeslin mice are mostly absent. It was a slog to read.

Then, after about two-thirds, the story found a center and came to life. The theme of the last third of the novel is grief. The protagonists are Mary and young folks Arthur and Elsie Harrington. Arthur and Elsie's mother Jane was killed by the Covenant in Aftermarket Afterlife. That was recent, and Elsie is still grieving. Arthur is grieving Jane, too, but he has his own problems. Although Mary has been a ghost for the last 77 years, she discovers reservoirs of unresolved grief from the deaths of her mother and father those many years ago.

Mourner's Waltz

Like all of McGuire's Incryptid novels, this one is packaged with a novella. It is called Mourner's Waltz and follows Verity Price. Verity, too is grieving. Her husband Dominic was also killed in Aftermarket Afterlife, and Verity is, not to put too fine a point on it, wallowing in her grief. She is pregnant with Dominic's last child -- their daughter Olivia is staying with the grandparents in Oregon, so Verity is alone. Even aside from the death of the father, it is not an easy pregnancy. Verity is employed as the manager of an apartment building in New York City. The building is owned by the New York dragons and the tenants are all cryptids.

She is confronted by a building maintenance problem of the type she's uniquely qualified to deal with, and at the end we are left with the feeling that she's snapped out of her funk.

in summary, Installment Immortality starts out as a slog but eventually steps up to become a good story. In her Acknowledgements McGuire mentioned that the book was written during the Covid shutdown, so perhaps the blah mood of the first two thirds has something to do with that.

I am grateful to NetGalley and Tor for an advance Reader copy of Installment Immortality.

Installment Immortality on Amazon

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