Backpacking Through Bedlam
Seanan McGuire
HAIL! The mice are back!
Backpacking Through Bedlam is the twelfth novel in Seanan McGuire's Incryptid series. More important, it is Grandma Alice's second major outing. McGuire has told us that Sarah Zellaby and Alice Healy-Price were the key characters around whom she built the Incryptid series. (McGuire plans her series many years in advance -- this is a pattern that she has shown in both the Incryptid and October Daye series.) Sarah's main outings were novels 9 and 10, Imaginary Numbers and Calculated Risks. Alice took her big step in novel 11, Spelunking Through Hell. With novel 12, Backpacking Through Bedlam, we enter a new phase of the Incryptid series. Oversimplifying -- novels 1-11 were the world-building novels. (Eleven novels and ten years of world-building. Impressive!) In novels 9 and 10 Sarah graduated, so to speak -- she is now an immensely powerful telepath and can in addition manipulate space and time. Another key character was brought into the fold in novel 11 -- Alice's husband Thomas, the patriarch of the Price family. What all that means, I think, is The Gang's All Here. (Not to say that it won't expand more -- one of the more endearing characteristics of the Price family is their tendency to take in strays. But the core family is now all present and ready for action.)
Alice's background is important in understanding Backpacking Through Bedlam. Years ago there was a race of cryptids called Kairos. They were a type of cryptid who manipulated luck. They were also immune to telepathic manipulation, and were therefore the nemesis of Johrlacs (like Sarah). The Johrlacs and the Covenant wiped out the purebred Kairos. However, Alice's mother Fran Brown was the daughter of a Kairos father and a human mother. Thus Fran was half Kairos and Alice is a quarter Kairos. She has substantial resistance to telepathy, and she has Kairos luck. Kairos luck means that improbable coincidences happen to her reliably. Kairos coincidences can be good luck or bad luck. I think the simplest description of Kairos luck is, "Things fall into place." An even more pointed description is "Kairos luck causes those coincidences that are most convenient for a fiction author who doesn't want to come up with a plausible rationale to bring all her pieces into play."
Unlike most of the Price family, Alice is not a planner. She herself says, "Thinking about the future has never been my area of expertise. Hell, thinking beyond what I was going to do tomorrow has never been my strong suit. Reacting is my primary way of dealing with the world." This works for her because of her Kairos luck.
The plot of Backpacking Through Bedlam appears weak to nonexistent. There is not really much of a conventional plot -- there is no one big issue we're trying to deal with throughout Backpacking Through Bedlam. A sort of plot does show up at about the 50% point and hang on through to the end, but it is the default plot of the entire Incryptid series (Price Family/Covenant war), so, to my mind, hardly counts. Instead Backpacking Through Bedlam feels like what McGuire has elsewhere called a stitch-up -- a novel-shaped object pieced together from a bunch of related stories.
I was less bothered by this than you might expect, because I suspect McGuire had a reason to do it that way. This, I think, is her way of showing us what the world looks like to Alice and her Kairos heritage. In fact, I really enjoyed reading Backpacking Through Bedlam. It was fun to see all these old friends together and to come to understand them better. I was disappointed by Alice in Spelunking Through Hell, which I rated only three stars. Alice is much more likeable in Backpacking Through Bedlam.
Another reason for liking Backpacking Through Bedlam is the one I alluded to at the top: the Aeslin Mice, who were absent for most of Spelunking Through Hell, are back in Backpacking Through Bedlam.
So, summing up, Backpacking Through Bedlam is a jumble of stuff, but it's fun stuff, lots of old friends bouncing off each other in entertaining ways, and there's a cognizable justification for the jumble. I waffled between three stars and four, but decided to give McGuire four for what I saw as a creative way of showing us Alice's character and world.
As usual, the book contains a bonus novella, The Mysteries of the Stolen God and Where His Waffles Went. In this novella point of view alternates between James Price and an Aeslin Mouse Acadia, who is one of his priestesses. James is The Stolen God (formerly James Baker, now calling himself James Price), whom Antimony more or less kidnapped (with his consent) from Maine where he grew up. In Spelunking Through Hell we met Sally, who had been banished to the same Crossroads exile as Thomas and become his second-in-command and de facto adopted daughter there. Sally Henderson was James' best friend in Maine and had made her deal with the Crossroads to get him out of his hometown. At the end of Spelunking Alice brought her to Kevin Price's compound in Oregon. Sally stole James' waffles and told the folks there (folks including Aeslin Mice) to tell James that Sally stole his waffles.
As you have no doubt guessed from the title, that communication is the subject of the novella. We see more deeply into the civilization and religion of the Aeslin in this story than we ever have before.
This was GREAT fun. If I were to rate the novella on its own, it would get five stars.
I thank NetGalley and DAW for an advance reader copy. This review expresses my honest opinions. Book release date 7-Mar-2023.