Overgrowth
Mira Grant
** spoiler alert **
Whose side are you on?
I confess that I don't like Mira Grant as much as Seanan McGuire. I know that they are the same person. But when McGuire publishes as Mira Grant, she writes in a different voice. This, I am quite sure, she does intentionally. (In the case of A. Deborah Baker, her other pseudonym that I know of, it is obvious that she is intentionally writing in a different voice, because A. Deborah Baker is a character in McGuire's Alchemical Journals novels, and author A. Deborah Baker is the voice of that character.)
Her Grant bio makes it clear that Mira Grant is intended as the horror brand. But this is not quite right. There is a fair amount of standard genre horror in the books she publishes as McGuire -- particularly the Incryptid series. The difference, I think, is that when she writes as Grant, she allows the monsters to eat the humans, and this often counts as a happy ending.
In other words, when McGuire writes as Grant, she often writes horror in which she attempts to place us readers on the monster's side against the humans. For instance, in her Parasitology novels humans are taken over by tapeworms, and the heroine is in fact one of these tapeworm-infested and controlled humans.
Well, got to give her points for creativity. I don't know any other author who writes like this. (Although I will admit that John Wiswell's Someone You Can Build a Nest In does something similar.) The problem for me is that it has kind of ceased to be all that much fun. Once you've identified the trick, it becomes just another of that author's tics. If she writes a good story she still gets credit for that, but there's no longer any "Oh, Wow!" to be gotten from eating the humans in a monsters-vs-humans struggle.
So, Overgrowth is an "Aliens invade the Earth" story. They win, and it is nevertheless a happy ending. (I marked this review a spoiler to allow myself to say that.)
It's creative, and I enjoyed it right up until the actual invasion got underway. Then, everything seemed to slow down drastically. In her most recent novels McGuire has had a problem: she explains too much. I think I would have enjoyed Overgrowth if she had left more for me to figure out, instead of explaining in detail all the metaphysical and ethical philosophical background behind the aliens' takeover.
By the time I reached the end, I was eager to be done with Overgrowth. It is, as far as I know, a standalone, and that's good. If there is ever a sequel, I will not read it.