Over nearly a decade, Seanan McGuire has established at least seven different fictional worlds, from faeries in the San Francisco Bay Area to examinations of what happens after “happily ever after,” and how civilization might survive and even (gasp) thrive after the zombie apocalypse. She regularly writes for at least five of these universes—so many that she needs another name to write them all!
Part of what makes McGuire’s work so engaging is that she pulls from preexisting folklore and pop culture and remixes these elements into wholly original worlds: St. George vs. the dragon, superheroes, marketing agencies, killer mermaids caught on camera, medical scares and scandals, fairy tale narratives that decide what the characters do instead of the other way around. Head below and see which of her worlds suit you best!
Wayward Children
Every Heart a Doorway | Down Among the Sticks and Bones | Beneath the Sugar Sky | In an Absent Dream | Come Tumbling Down (2020)
Not content just to control multiple worlds through different book series, McGuire dreamed up a universe composed of countless worlds accessible through all manner of doors. (Here’s a handy guide to all of the ones we know about so far!) Her first Tor.com Publishing novella subverts the typical portal fantasy story—think Alice in Wonderland, or the Narnia series—by asking what happens after the protagonist saves the fantasy world, and is no longer useful. “Imagine being pulled out of your normal world for a special task […] and then, when it’s over, being thrown back into your normal life, and told that you’re never going to be able to go back to the place where you were special, accepted, happy, and whole,” she explained in a 2016 interview. Dark stuff, but a necessary coming-of-age story for readers who wished they could cross through a magical wardrobe. In the case of Nancy, the latest portal fantasy castoff in Every Heart a Doorway, she finds solace in Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, where she and her fellow misfits are allowed to share stories of the worlds they can no longer access as they grapple with transitioning back to the “real” world.
Subsequent novellas have followed the other Wayward Children into and out of their respective portal fantasies: Down Among the Sticks and Bones delves into the intertwined origin story of twins Jack and Jill in the ghastly Moors, while Beneath the Sugar Sky opens with a girl in a dress made of sugar tumbling out of Confection, a magical world reminiscent of Candyland. With In an Absent Dream, McGuire takes the opportunity to introduce readers to “people who had found their own doors and then lost them”—here, bitter Lundy and the Goblin Market, with its grotesque insistence on Fair Value, that broke her. Come Tumbling Down (publishing January 2020) sees the return of Jack, and the breaking of Eleanor West’s “No Quests” rule (again).
Available from Tor.com Publishing.
October Daye
Rosemary and Rue | A Local Habitation | An Artificial Night | Late Eclipses | One Salt Sea | Ashes of Honor | Chimes at Midnight | The Winter Long | A Red-Rose Chain | Once Broken Faith | The Brightest Fell | Night and Silence | The Unkindest Tide (September 2019)
Part-human, part-fae, changeling October “Toby” Daye has always moved between worlds: She’s grown up in the Summerlands, come of age at the Home for homeless changelings, tried to make a life in San Francisco with a human husband while simultaneously working as a knight in the Faerie Kingdom of the Mists overlaying Northern California. But after a faerie curse steals fourteen years of her life—and cuts her off from her family—Toby is ready to embrace only the human side of her heritage. Too bad that a dying fae geases her via answering machine into solving her murder and therefore returning to the Kingdom of the Mists. But why are they so happy to have her back?
Spells via modern technology—these are the kinds of intersections you see in great urban fantasy. Grounding the story in a familiar city makes for fascinating explorations into Faerie; for instance, did you know that the Japanese Tea Gardens in Golden Gate Park is actually a Fae kingdom masquerading as tourist destination? Toby’s new life begins in 2009, when the series began, and has continued on for ten books full of Cat Kings, Banshee/Siren Queens, kidnappings, gaslighting, and human police who just don’t get it. McGuire has plans to write at least three more volumes, though she’s open to adding in adventures; as she explained in a recent Reddit AMA, “I know exactly where the ending is. We veer left or right sometimes, to spend a little while exploring interesting landmarks (see! The Biggest Ball of Twine in Urban Fantasy!), but I always have my eyes on the final book.” And yes, they’re all named after lines from Shakespeare plays.
Available from DAW Books.
InCryptid
Discount Armageddon | Midnight Blue-Light Special | Half-Off Ragnarok | Pocket Apocalypse | Chaos Choreography | Magic for Nothing | Tricks for Free | That Ain’t Witchcraft | Imaginary Numbers (expected March 2020)
Cryptid, noun:
1. Any creature whose existence has been suggested but not proven scientifically. Term officially coined by cryptozoologist John E. Wall in 1983.
2. That thing that’s getting ready to eat your head.
3. See also: “monster.”
The Covenant of St. George was tasked with eliminating cryptids, the “unnatural” creatures not allowed on the Ark when the world ended the first time. But when Alexander and Enid Healy suffer a crisis of conscience, they defect from the Covenant and turn their skills toward protecting the cryptids. Not that the cryptids are entirely innocent, either…
Cryptozoologist, noun: Any person who thinks hunting for cryptids is a good idea. See also “idiot.”
The Healys’ choice, though it claims their lives, ripples down through the generations. InCryptid follows jill-of-all-trades Verity Price: ballroom dancer, former reality TV star, and journeyman cryptozoologist reluctantly spends her spare time protecting cryptids from the Covenant of St. George. Despite her knowledge of the cryptids world, Verity just wants to work on her dancing career… but Dominic De Luca, her on-again/off-again boyfriend and a member of the Covenant, keeps tipping her off to cryptids who need her protection. And she’s just one member of the cryptozoologist family; her brother Alexander Price and cousin Sarah Zellaby have their own agendas, as well.
Compared to the October Daye series, InCryptid is a more open-ended world—McGuire said on Reddit: “[T]he ending is a little more malleable, because every member of the family has their own natural end-point, in addition to the ending for the overall family story. So Verity may have an ending long before Antimony does, and everyone may finish before Elsie. That sort of thing. There, I make sure I know how each family member ends once their turn comes up, and otherwise let the metaplot go where it will.”
Available from DAW Books.
Ghost Roads
Sparrow Hill Road | The Girl in the Green Silk Gown
Everyone has heard the urban legend of the pretty girl who charms a ride from a sweet boy, only for him to discover the next morning that she’s been dead for decades. She’s the Phantom Prom Date, the Girl in the Diner, the Girl in the Green Silk Gown—or, as she’s best known, Rose Marshall. Out on the ghostroads—routewitches and ambulomancers crossing paths in midnight America—Rose was the unlucky victim of Bobby Cross, the man who sold his soul to live forever. Sixty years after her death (and many urban legend appearances), Rose is still running from her killer, forever searching the horizon for her long-sought-after freedom. After all, what does she have to lose?
What began as a series of stories in the InCryptid universe has become its own series, as Rose faces off against Bobby at the crossroads:
Once and twice and thrice around,
Put your heart into the ground.
Four and five and six tears shed,
Give your love unto the dead.
Seven shadows on the wall,
Eight have come to watch your fall:
One’s for the gargoyle, one’s for the grave,
And the last is for the one you’ll never save.
Available from DAW Books.
Velveteen vs.
Velveteen vs. the Isley Crayfish Festival | vs. The Coffee Freaks | vs. The Flashback Sequence | vs. The Old Flame | vs. The Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division | vs. The Eternal Halloween | vs. The Ordinary Day | vs. Patrol | vs. The Blind Date
What if superheroes didn’t work alone, but were united under one organization—not a league of justice, but an actual corporation? Velma “Velveteen” Martinez is one of many gifted youngsters “adopted” by The Super Patriots, Inc., which nurtured her powers and made her their sweetest, most marketable superpowered asset. But when Velma decides to graduate from superhero adolescence and spend her adulthood as a civilian, the Marketing Department doesn’t take kindly to losing its investment.
Not surprisingly, McGuire’s take on the superhero genre is wonderfully meta: Velma herself realizes that the stock tropes shaping her superhero life—including a big friend breakup in her teens—are all engineered by the Marketing Department. Rather than turn to The Super Patriots, Inc. for instructions on how to use her powers, she takes to fan forums for guidance. When her decision to leave SPI brands her a supervillain by the media, Velveteen bands together with other misfits who “washed out” or otherwise cut ties with SPI in order to defend against attacks on their lives… and their reputations.
Available online and in collected editions from ISFiC Press.
Indexing
Indexing | Indexing: Reflections
In McGuire’s world, you don’t tell fairy tales—fairy tales tell you. That is, the narrative of your favorite Brothers Grimm and Disney stories is a magical force that will stop at nothing to act out a particular story, no matter the collateral damage. That’s where the ATI Management Bureau comes in; with the help of the Aarne-Thompson Index, they identify and stop these memetic incursions before they rack up victims on their way to happily ever after. Because while HEA might mean a true love’s kiss or an evil queen defeated, the innocent bystanders make up a pretty high body count.
What makes the ATI agents so good at their jobs? They’re all touched by the narrative, frozen in different spots of their respective fairy tale stories as quasi-tropes. Henry (short for Henrietta) is a 709, Snow White in a holding pattern, with the otherworldly looks (white skin, red lips, black hair) and pesky birds slamming themselves into her window in some odd form of tribute. Her fellow agent Sloane missed becoming a Wicked Stepsister (315) by inches, but no one trusts her to make coffee or drive a car, lest it trigger her homicidal tendencies. Nevertheless, her averted incursion allows her to sense when the story is trying to cast someone in the central role. Sleeping Beauty (410) cases means everyone falls asleep and then dies; Goldilocks and the Three Bears (171) cases will probably end with someone getting mauled.
Indexing is a serial published by Amazon’s 47North imprint.
Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day
In this standalone urban fantasy novella, life and death is a matter of debts and balances: Every soul, living or dead, is promised a certain amount of time. When Jenna died, she discovered that she had a debt of time owed to her. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for her sister Patty, who is well and truly gone, Jenna’s death having followed hers. A ghost who has yet to move on, Jenna works for a suicide hotline and surreptitiously passes time to the living, extending their lifetimes as much as she can in small and large ways. But when all of New York City’s ghosts disappear, Jenna is drawn to investigate what force is binding their souls to mirrors for its dark bidding. But while the problem begins in the Big Apple, to solve it Jenna must return to her hometown—where Patty and she are buried.
Available from Tor.com Publishing.
Middlegame
America is run in the shadows by the Alchemical Congress, a powerful society focused on transmuting reality itself.
Meet Roger. Skilled with words, languages come easily to him. He instinctively understands how the world works through the power of story. Meet Dodger, his twin. Numbers are her world, her obsession, her everything. All she understands, she does so through the power of math. Roger and Dodger aren’t exactly human, though they don’t realise it. They aren’t exactly gods, either. Not entirely. Not yet.
Meet Reed, skilled in the alchemical arts like his progenitor before him. Reed created Dodger and her brother. He’s not their father. Not quite. But he has a plan: to raise the twins to the highest power, to ascend with them and claim their authority as his own.
Godhood is attainable. Pray it isn’t attained.
Available from Tor.com Publishing.
Laughter at the Academy
Laughter at the Academy (October 2019)
The first collection of McGuire’s short fiction (22 stories in all) take place outside of the aforementioned universes. As she explains in her introduction, “They are quick glimpses of another room, with a door that will close in short order.” More from the publisher, with some hints as to the tales contained therein:
Meet the mad scientists of “Laughter at the Academy” and “The Tolling of Pavlov’s Bells.” Glory in the potential of a Halloween that never ends. Follow two very different alphabets in “Frontier ABCs” and “From A to Z in the Book of Changes.” Get “Lost,” dress yourself “In Skeleton Leaves,” and remember how to fly. All this and more is waiting for you within the pages of this decade-spanning collection, including several pieces that have never before been reprinted. Stories about mermaids, robots, dolls, and Deep Ones are all here, ready for you to dive in.
“This isn’t necessarily ‘the best of,'” McGuire says, “but it’s the pieces I love most, that I’m most eager to share.”
Available October 2019 from Subterranean Press.
When McGuire wants to write science fiction, thrillers, and horror, she turns to her open pseudonym Mira Grant. “I wanted a pseudonym for my science fiction because I wanted to create some ‘distance’ between it and my urban fantasy work,” she explains on her website. “Mostly, I wanted people to judge the Mira Grant books on their own merits, not based on how much they read like something they’d expect me to write. I believe this was the right decision, and I’ve been very happy with my life as Mira Grant.”
Newsflesh
Feed | Deadline | Blackout | Rise | Feedback
While zombie stories endlessly crop up like the pesky living dead they depict, Grant’s Newsflesh series is one of the rare zombie narratives that sets the undead in the context of wholly unique worldbuilding. For one, everyone is infected—with Kellis-Amberlee, the hybrid virus made up of the cure for cancer and the cure for the common cold. KA lays dormant in all mammals… until they die, and amplify into zombies. While the Rising (beginning in 2014) is contained within a few years, it is by no means eradicated: By the time Feed opens in 2040, an entire generation has grown up knowing about zombies—accustomed to regular blood tests, willing and able to shoot at anything amplified, and, in many cases, named after major figures in zombie lore. Take the two main characters, bloggers Shaun (for Shaun of the Dead) and Georgia (for George Romero) Mason. Unlike most stories within this genre, in the Newflesh universe, zombies are a part of pop culture even before the Rising.
But how do people in this world learn about KA in the first place? That’s all thanks to bloggers. While the mainstream media initially shrugged off the first zombie sightings as erratic flu behavior or zombie cosplay, it was bloggers who delivered on-the-ground, no-holds-barred reports about what was really happening. By 2040, people trust bloggers—now split into groups of Newsies, Irwins, Stewarts, Aunties, and Fictionals based on their specialties and writing styles—to tell the truth. If the commentary on virology, zombies, and journalism weren’t enough, Grant also throws in politics: After the End Times, Shaun and Georgia’s blog, follows Republican senator Peter Ryman on the campaign trail, which might more accurately be described as a minefield.
And that’s just the first book! Newsflesh takes some gutsy risks including (highlight text for spoilers) Georgia amplifying, with Shaun having to execute her, the introduction of equally-plausible cloning technology to “resurrect” the dead in an entirely new way, and a taboo love story. It’s an incredibly smart, well-researched series that deserves to join Romero’s oeuvre, Max Brooks’ World War Z, and other entries in the zombie pantheon. Good news for old and new fans: 2016 will see the release of two Newsflesh books: Rise, collecting all of the short fiction in the Newsflesh universe; and Feedback, a retelling of Feed from the perspective of the Democratic party.
Available from Orbit Books.
Parasitology
For her second trilogy, Grant went back to the same question that inspired Newsflesh: How much would you trust a medicine with regulating your body from disease? In this case, it’s SymboGen’s Intestinal Bodyguard: a genetically engineered tapeworm that gives you the proper doses of insulin, estrogen, endorphins—whatever chemical or hormone your body needs to function. For all the ick factor of willingly putting a tapeworm egg in your body, there are the countless tradeoffs: better, more affordable healthcare; not having to remember daily pills or injections; defense against the germs pressing in from outside. Consider Sally, SymboGen’s poster child for incredible success: After a car accident left her in a coma with no chance of waking up, her Intestinal Bodyguard virtually brought her back from the dead.
But not everyone else is so fortunate: Six years after Sally’s miraculous recovery, people start coming down with a strange “sleeping sickness” that looks less like sleepwalking and more like the walking dead. At the same time, Sally and her boyfriend Nathan uncover a vast conspiracy involving SymboGen, Nathan’s supposedly dead scientist mother, and—most terrifyingly—the notion that the tapeworms are sentient beings. Just like in Feed, Grant employs a fascinating narrative device in the first installment, Parasite (highlight for spoilers): Partway through the book, after meeting several hosts completely controlled by their tapeworms, Sally realizes that she is a tapeworm, too. But she suffers a mental break that makes her forget this information until the end of the book.
For all of their zombie allusions, Grant’s stories are based in real science and—even more frighteningly—in the societal shifts that already exist, like our willingness to take whatever pill is needed without questioning what’s in the pill. Putting the thrill in medical thrillers, that’s Mira Grant.
Available from Orbit Books.
Rolling in the Deep
Rolling in the Deep | Into the Drowning Deep
Mira Grant does killer mermaids. Do you really need more than that?
OK—Mira Grant does killer mermaids through the lens of the documentary film crew sent into the Mariana Trench to investigate their existence. When the Imagine Network decided to move beyond its usual B-movie fare by commissioning a mockumentary about the supposed mermaids in the deep, it never imagined that the crew of the cruise ship Atargatis would be lost at sea, its demise called both a hoax and a maritime tragedy. Seven years later, a new crew assembles—not to study the mermaids with sharp teeth lurking beneath the waves, but for revenge. And no one is thirstier for blood than ambitious young scientist Victoria Stewart, avenging the sister she lost to the deep.
Available from Subterranean Press and Orbit Books.
Kingdom of Needle and Bone
The latest Mira Grant novella recasts pandemics as fairy tales: As we develop the vaccines to fend off these simple monsters, they retreated into myth—supposedly stuck in the past, unable to reach us in the present. But as the memories of these pandemics have faded, so too have our collective knowledge of how to defend against these insidious fairy tales. Then comes an old horror with a new name—Morris’ disease:
It begins with a fever. By the time the spots appear, it’s too late: Morris’s disease is loose on the world, and the bodies of the dead begin to pile high in the streets. When its terrible side consequences for the survivors become clear, something must be done, or the dying will never stop. For Dr. Isabella Gauley, whose niece was the first confirmed victim, the route forward is neither clear nor strictly ethical, but it may be the only way to save a world already in crisis. It may be the only way to atone for her part in everything that’s happened.
She will never be forgiven, not by herself, and not by anyone else. But she can, perhaps, do the right thing.
McGuire has described the novella as “about virology, and the anti-vaccination movement, and the choices we make, and the words that we break. It is about miracles and monsters, and about a woman who balances between the two.”
Available from Subterranean Press.
Final Girls
Dr. Jennifer Webb has pioneered a groundbreaking virtual reality technology that not only aids its users in confronting their greatest fears, but also instills the kinds of lasting bonds you form only after surviving a horror movie with someone else. Of course, for every horror tale there must be a skeptic—enter Esther Hoffman, who has dedicated her journalism career to debunking pseudoscience after regression therapy destroyed her family. While Dr. Webb is all too happy to allow Esther unprecedented access to her technology, hoping to change the other woman’s mind, instead they will find themselves unwitting allies. Because Esther is not the only one curious about this technology—and nightmares don’t just exist in Dr. Webb’s lab…
Available from Subterranean Press.
In the Shadow of Spindrift House
In the Shadow of Spindrift House (June 2019)
Just as Seanan McGuire tackles what happens to the heroes of portal fantasy in the Wayward Children books, Mira Grant explores the fate of a teen detective agency once puberty hits and grown-up responsibilities come knocking. Having lost her parents at a young age to murder by a mysterious cult, Harlowe Upton-Jones has devoted her relatively short life to solving mysteries; but when her fellow teen detectives begin thinking about the mysteries of their respective futures, she must locate the perfect final case for them.
That sendoff comes in the form of the decrepit Spindrift House… but maybe Harlowe should have read more teen mysteries, because the enigmatic manor has more than a few deadly secrets locked behind its doors.
“In the Shadow of Spindrift House is a bit of a departure for Mira,” McGuire writes on Twitter, “it’s in many ways more of a Seanan work, which made the authorial voice a fun challenge, since I needed to justify it being a part of the Grant oeuvre. It’s about mysteries, and family, and the dangers we pull down on our own heads.”
Available from Subterranean Press.
It may be hard to pick just one, but which of Seanan McGuire’s worlds is your favorite?
This article was originally published in March 2016, and has been updated with new titles.
Natalie Zutter was so vindicated to read Newsflesh when she was embarking on a blogging career in 2010. Talk zombie journalism and portal fantasy with her on Twitter!
