★★★★☆ Patreon Year 4, by Seanan McGuire
Alice and Thomas, Fairies, ruin stories, and *Cheese*
Patreon Year 4
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 64 now (September 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 an 80,000-word 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 nine novels of the Incryptid series (that is, through Imaginary Numbers) and all the Incryptid short stories listed on McGuire's web site Incryptid Short Stories and the 37 stories posted in her first three years on Patreon (June 2016 - May 2019). 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 fourth year on Patreon. These are:
Sun Sets Weeping (Luidaeg #2), June 2019 Patreon reward
Face Your Furs, July 2019 Patreon reward
Dreams and Sighs (Tybalt #10), August 2019 Patreon reward
Come Marching In, (Come Marching in #1), September 2019 Patreon reward
Take the Shot, (Alice and Thomas #4), October 2019 Patreon reward
Winter Sunshine, (Alice and Thomas #5), November 2019 Patreon reward
Help Wanted, December 2019 Patreon reward
Off-Balance, (Alice and Thomas #6), January 2020 Patreon reward
All That Glitters, (Alice and Thomas #7), February 2020 Patreon reward
Another Beautiful Day, (Come Marching in #2), March 2019 Patreon reward
In the Land of Rainbows and Ash, April 2020 Patreon reward
The Proper Thing, May 2020 Patreon reward
This year marks a major switch from the October Daye continuity to the Incryptid. We have this year only two October Daye world stories: Sun Sets Weeping and Dreams and Sighs. I haven't been all that thrilled with the previous October Daye Patreon stories, but these were pretty good. Sun Sets Weeping (which is Luidaeg #2, because The Fixed Stars was Luidaeg #1) is a transposition of the classic story of Merlin's downfall at the hands of Nimue to the October Daye world. As for Dreams and Sighs, I haven't liked the previous Tybalt stories because Tybalt was kind of an a--hole. However, McGuire's purpose is finally becoming clear. I think she wants to show his evolution from a consummate jerk to a rather likeable person. Dreams and Sighs is the first story where you can perceive that beginning to happen. And it only took ten Tybalt stories to get us there!
In contrast, this year's batch of Patreon stories has four from the Incryptid world: the four Alice and Thomas stories. (These are Alice and Thomas #4-7 because there are three in the non-Patreon Incryptid stories.) I have been eager for these for a while. We already know from the Incryptid novel that Alice Healy and Thomas Price will marry, and that their brood will give rise to the Price family on whom the Incryptid stories are centered. This is, in my mind, the central story of the Price family. We already know how it's going to turn out from hints in the novels, which include Grandma Alice and Dead Aunt Mary as major characters. (Not Thomas, because he was lost through events not yet fully disclosed.) That they call themselves the "Price family", and that they are famous among North American cryptids under that name, shows that Alice and Thomas are really the origin of the family (even though ancestors Enid and Alexander Healy and Jonathan and Fran Healy's stories are told in detail in other Incryptid stories). All seven Alice and Thomas stories up to this point are about the courtship of Alice and Thomas. They are good stories, though still not terribly conclusive.
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." The ruin stories are mostly about about a sort of apocalypse or dystopia -- 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. The stories in this collection that feel to me like ruin stories are Face Your Furs, Come Marching In, Help Wanted, Another Beautiful Day, and In the Land of Rainbows and Ash. (And understand, that is merely what I am calling them -- there are none in Patreon Year 4 that McGuire herself explained as ruin stories.) In this batch, Help Wanted is less dreary than the rest.
That leaves us with The Proper Thing, which is about magic cheese. Oddly enough, this felt familiar, as I recently read another book about magic cheese, Frances Hardinge's splendid A Face Like Glass. Unlike A Face Like Glass, The Proper Thing is not a full-fledged novel. It is however, a substantial novella of ten chapters with a well-developed plot and a very likeable main character. I enjoyed it a lot.