★★★☆☆ No One Leaves for Good, by Seanan McGuire
A missing scene from Aftermarket Afterlife
No One Leaves for Good
Seanan McGuire
A missing scene from Aftermarket Afterlife
No One Leaves for Good is Seanan McGuire's Patreon reward for June, 2024. She introduces it as follows
(Image: My current collection of the classic Magic the Gathering books, hard-won from used bookstores around the state.)
Welcome to June! This month, we're bopping over to InCryptid to watch the family reunion we missed in the book proper, mostly because there was no way to line it all up with the timeline of Aftermarket Aftermath. Elsie narrates, and everyone else just tries to keep their heads above water.
Best read after Aftermarket.
I will assume that you have, in fact read Aftermarket Afterlife, and this review will contain spoilers for that novel. To wit, I assumed when I saw the title that No One Leaves for Good might be a reference to Jane Rose and Dominic De Luca, who are shockingly killed in No One Leaves for Good. Since there are ghosts in the Incrytptid Universe -- indeed, Aftermarket Afterlife is told from the first-person point-of-view of one such ghost, Mary Dunlavy -- it is not absurd to imagine that the dead could come back in some form. (The possibility of Dominic returning as a ghost seemed however to be closed out by the bonus novella Dreaming of You in Freefall included after Aftermarket Afterlife.) In fact, No One Leaves for Good, does not touch on events after the deaths of Jane Rose and Dominic at all. I'm not quite sure what the title refers to, but it might be Thomas Price and Sally Price (formerly Sally Henderson), who spent years squirreled away in a dystopic dimension before they were rescued by Grandma Alice.
No One Leaves for Good is a substantial work, sixty pages in PDF, so a novella. In it Elsie reports on the reunion of most of the family at Kevin Price's compound in Oregon. (I say "most of the family", because Verity and Dominic are absent, as are Alex and Shelby.) This is a family with a propensity for violence and lots of issues, so there would be no guarantee that everyone comes out intact, except we know from Aftermarket Afterlife that they do. We do get a lot of arguments, mostly between Jane Rose and Grandma Alice. There is also a certain amount of passive-aggressive posturing. There are also heartfelt meetings and reunions, for instance between long-lost Thomas and his son Kevin, and between former best friends James and Sally, who are now adoptive siblings.
I also enjoyed a story from Elsie's point of view -- we don't usually see much of her, though I hope one day she'll get her own Incryptid novels.