★★★☆☆ A Solitude of Space, by Seanan McGuire
A second installment in what looks like a serialized novella
A Solitude of Space
Seanan McGuire
A second installment in what looks like a serialized novella
“A Solitude of Space” is Seanan McGuire’s April, 2026 Patreon reward. She introduces it as follows,
(Image: Thomas--a fluffy blue classic tabby Maine Coon--wearing a hot dog costume, looking at someone outside the shot. He doesn’t seem particularly bothered.)
Because I told myself I wasn’t going to write another short novel by surprise, here is the next part of the death and burial of Alexander Healy, which is a short story in its own right. Alice is not having her best time ever, and is probably going to kill her father. (I mean, we know she doesn’t, but still.)
InCryptid, backstory timeline, moving steadily toward the uncertain present.
When she says “the next part of the death and burial of Alexander Healy,” she implicitly references “In A Yellow Wood,” which was the first part of that story. I take that paragraph as a revelation that what we have here is, although she is reluctant to acknowledge it, the first two chapters of a serialized novella about the death of Alice Price-Healy’s grandfather Alex Healy. We know from And Sweep up the Wood, the novella that accompanied Spelunking Through Hell that Alex died in the Buckley Forest, a place that Alice has a lot of history with, in 1958.
“In A Yellow Wood” was about Alice getting the news of her grandfather’s death and rushing to Buckley. In this story Alice begins to investigate the death. She really does little more than gather a clue or two. So, presumably, we have more installments to come. I take this as good news—I want the whole story, and I’m now reasonably confident that we will eventually get it.