Seanan McGuire: Discount Armageddon
May. 10th, 2018 02:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bibliogrammaSeanan McGuire’s InCryptid series has been nominated for a Hugo award, and so, I checked out the first book in the series, Discount Armageddon. So far, the best thing about it is the Aeslin mice, but I’ll get to them a few paragraphs down the line.
So, this is a fairly standard urban fantasy, of the “not all monsters are really monsters” variety. The protagonist, Verity Price, is a member of a family with a mission. Once they were part of the Covenant, a secret society devoted to killing anything that isn’t human, or found within the pages if a standard zoology textbook. Though, being religious zealots of a Christian flavor, they put it as “anything that was not on the Ark.” A couple of centuries back, Verity’s ancestors turned heretic - the Covenant is big on terms like blasphemy and heresy - and instead of killing monsters, which they call cryptids, indiscriminately, they study them, try to protect, or at least stay on good terms with, the ones who are not actively harming people, and try to reason with, relocate, or otherwise neutralise the harmful ones, killing as a last resort.
Verity Price, like the rest of her family, calls herself a cryptozoologist more often than a monster hunter, although it’s true that she’s trained in all sorts of armed and unarmed combat and able to take out a nasty critter aimed on destruction if need be. But what Verity really wants to do is be a professional competitive ballroom dancer. So she moved from the family stronghold in the northwest to New York, where she waits tables at a strip club run by a bogeyman, studies the local cryptid population, patrols for nasties, and tries to get established in the local competitive dance scene under a stage name.
The plot, which given the set-up isn’t all that unexpected, involves Verity and a hot young Covenanter lad, who views her as a heretic to be killed with just as much fervour as he woukd any other blasphemous creature, having to team up to deal with something bigger than both of them. I’m probably not really spoiling anything by saying that sex occurs, and Verity manages to do some deprogramming on said hot Covenanter lad.
Right, now for the mice. Actually, the plot introduces us to a fair number of interesting non-human species, but really, the mice, as it were, take the cake. Aeslin mice are sapient mice-like cryptids, who live in social units called colonies. They are very religious and very enthusiastic about their objects of worship. Verity shares her tiny flat with a branch colony of Aeslin mice, who are part of a larger family of mice who have worshipped the founders of Price family for seven human generations. Verity is their Priestess, and they spend most of their time celebrating one of the endless religious observances in their mousey calendar, such as sixth day of the Month of Do Not Put That in Your Mouth!, and the Festival of Come On, Enid, We’re Getting Out Of Here Before These Bastards Make Us Kill Another Innocent Creature. They also become filled with the holy spirit whenever Verity mutters things to herself, or talks to them, which means that her homelife is filled with mousey choruses of “Hail the buying of new socks” and “Hail the shower!” Most of the novel is pretty standard sardonic somewhat unwilling heroine-centred first-person narrative urban fantasy, with some solid development of legends and speculations about various sorts of imaginary beings from cultures around the world. Fun but not what I’d call spectacularly good. But the Aeslin mice are brilliant.
So, this is a fairly standard urban fantasy, of the “not all monsters are really monsters” variety. The protagonist, Verity Price, is a member of a family with a mission. Once they were part of the Covenant, a secret society devoted to killing anything that isn’t human, or found within the pages if a standard zoology textbook. Though, being religious zealots of a Christian flavor, they put it as “anything that was not on the Ark.” A couple of centuries back, Verity’s ancestors turned heretic - the Covenant is big on terms like blasphemy and heresy - and instead of killing monsters, which they call cryptids, indiscriminately, they study them, try to protect, or at least stay on good terms with, the ones who are not actively harming people, and try to reason with, relocate, or otherwise neutralise the harmful ones, killing as a last resort.
Verity Price, like the rest of her family, calls herself a cryptozoologist more often than a monster hunter, although it’s true that she’s trained in all sorts of armed and unarmed combat and able to take out a nasty critter aimed on destruction if need be. But what Verity really wants to do is be a professional competitive ballroom dancer. So she moved from the family stronghold in the northwest to New York, where she waits tables at a strip club run by a bogeyman, studies the local cryptid population, patrols for nasties, and tries to get established in the local competitive dance scene under a stage name.
The plot, which given the set-up isn’t all that unexpected, involves Verity and a hot young Covenanter lad, who views her as a heretic to be killed with just as much fervour as he woukd any other blasphemous creature, having to team up to deal with something bigger than both of them. I’m probably not really spoiling anything by saying that sex occurs, and Verity manages to do some deprogramming on said hot Covenanter lad.
Right, now for the mice. Actually, the plot introduces us to a fair number of interesting non-human species, but really, the mice, as it were, take the cake. Aeslin mice are sapient mice-like cryptids, who live in social units called colonies. They are very religious and very enthusiastic about their objects of worship. Verity shares her tiny flat with a branch colony of Aeslin mice, who are part of a larger family of mice who have worshipped the founders of Price family for seven human generations. Verity is their Priestess, and they spend most of their time celebrating one of the endless religious observances in their mousey calendar, such as sixth day of the Month of Do Not Put That in Your Mouth!, and the Festival of Come On, Enid, We’re Getting Out Of Here Before These Bastards Make Us Kill Another Innocent Creature. They also become filled with the holy spirit whenever Verity mutters things to herself, or talks to them, which means that her homelife is filled with mousey choruses of “Hail the buying of new socks” and “Hail the shower!” Most of the novel is pretty standard sardonic somewhat unwilling heroine-centred first-person narrative urban fantasy, with some solid development of legends and speculations about various sorts of imaginary beings from cultures around the world. Fun but not what I’d call spectacularly good. But the Aeslin mice are brilliant.
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Date: 2018-05-11 12:40 am (UTC)