It’s time, once again, to talk about one of my favorite authors. I swear I read books by other writers. (In fact, I am currently plowing through Emma Newman’s Planetfall — so good!) I’m simply a huge fan of her work. That’s no secret. I am here today to talk about one of her older novels, one that you may not be familiar with. I’m referring to Indexing. The novel, which originally appeared as a Kindle Serial for Amazon, doesn’t get as much attention as any of her other work. Why? I’m not certain. It could have something to do with the original limited availability of the book — it was originally an Amazon exclusive. This, however, is no longer the case. I just checked both Barnes and Noble and Book Depository, and it is indeed available for sale in other places. HAIL THE AVAILABILITY OF THE BOOK!
Ahem.
Indexing (2013)
Written by: Seanan McGuire
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Pages: 418 (Trade Paperback)
Series: Book One of Indexing
Publisher: 47North
Why I Chose It: I’ve been watching Once Upon a Time, thanks to Merrin’s recent post on the seventh season, and all I kept thinking after I’d finished an episode was that I wanted to revisit Indexing. So I did.
The premise:
“Never underestimate the power of a good story.”
Good advice…especially when a story can kill you.
For most people, the story of their lives is just that: the accumulation of time, encounters, and actions into a cohesive whole. But for an unfortunate few, that day-to-day existence is affected—perhaps infected is a better word—by memetic incursion: where fairy tale narratives become reality, often with disastrous results.
That’s where the ATI Management Bureau steps in, an organization tasked with protecting the world from fairy tales, even while most of their agents are struggling to keep their own fantastic archetypes from taking over their lives. When you’re dealing with storybook narratives in the real world, it doesn’t matter if you’re Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, or the Wicked Queen: no one gets a happily ever after.
No spoilers
So the first thing that you need to know is that ATI refers to Aarne-Thompson Index, which aims to collect all of the variations on classic folk and fairy tales. You can read more about it right here.
The second thing that you need to know is that these tales? Are real. At least, within the context of this book. Know someone who happens to be a musical genius that commands their music with such power that it’s almost magic? You might be dealing with a Pied Piper. Dating someone who cautions you to never, ever look in the basement? Congratulations! You’ve matched with a Bluebeard! Sure, it sounds like it might be fun. Who among us hasn’t dreamed of starring in their own version of happily ever after? However, what you aren’t getting is that these stories are legitimately dangerous. Imagine, if you will, that you encounter a Sleeping Beauty. She falls asleep, taking down everyone who’s unlucky enough to be close enough to the blast radius. Sure, everyone is supposed to wake up after a hundred years, but what if time catches up with all of those involved and everyone dies of old age two minutes after they wake up? What if the curse doesn’t manage to keep people in stasis and they die from dehydration?
It’s not so fun when you think about it that way.
This is why the ATI Management Bureau is here to protect and serve. They’re responsible for catching these stories before they can cause too much collateral damage. It’s neither easy nor fun, but it’s necessary. Think of this novel like the love child of Law and Order and, well, Once Upon a Time, and you’ll have an idea of what you’re getting yourself into.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about the book!
Henrietta Marchen, our narrator and leader of a Bureau field team, is a Snow White in waiting. She’s on the cusp of becoming the very thing that she’s tasked with preventing and containing. She works with three other individuals who are on the spectrum themselves, and one whose life was directly affected by a fairy tale that got out of hand. These folks are invested in their work because they understand the true danger of the phrase “once upon a time.” Henry was raised by the Bureau, after being born a fairy tale: her mother was a Sleeping Beauty. Henry and her twin brother Gerry, were on track to become Snow White and Rose Red before other circumstances thwarted that particular story. Gerry escaped; Henry was shuffled into the more widely popular version of the Snow White tale.
My favorite member of the team, Sloane Winters, is a Wicked Stepsister. She’s a natural villain. This makes her particularly dangerous to Henry — a Wicked Stepsister is not so far from an Evil Queen, but thanks to Sloane’s dedication to bucking her nature, she has managed to stay alive and avoid murdering her own teammates. She’s also much, much older than anyone truly knows. Something about her story being in abeyance has given her the appearance of being an eternally young woman. Sloane’s described as being a fairy tale bloodhound. She can sense memetic incursions and feel the way that the story shifts, changes, and (hopefully) breaks once incidents are underway. She’s also deeply sarcastic, eternally pissed off, and fiercely devoted to her team. During the novel’s final pages, we get a chance to spend a lot of time with Sloane as she fights back against the evil that has infiltrated the field office. She doesn’t talk about the office as her workplace. It’s her home. And her team? That’s her family. She’ll be damned if she lets anybody even attempt to take any of them away from her. Her entire arc within this story is painful to read at times, but that’s what makes it work. She’s had a lot of practice fighting rogue fairy tales, and she’s great at it because she spends every waking moment with her own internal fight. Her methods of dealing with these incursions are occasionally hilarious. There’s a would-be Peter Pan who Sloane manages to thwart in an extremely unconventional manner. The scene left me in giggles, despite the gravity of the situation.
The actual villain of the piece is a little flatter than what I’ve come to anticipate, but it makes sense, if one looks at what this story is dealing with. Legends, folklore, myths…all of these spawned countless tropes. Of course the villain has cloudy motivations and unclear goals. They are fulfilling a particular role in the narrative, and that’s it. Stereotypical villains don’t have to have clear motives or complicated back stories. Sometimes they can just be evil for no apparent reason. That seems to be the case here. Also? Some of what this villain manages to do is actually, genuinely horrifying. There’s a particular scene that is not for those who are sensitive to the treatment of animals. It’s not terribly graphic, but it’s here. Read with care.
As per usual with a McGuire book, people from all walks of life are represented in bright, shining beauty. This is something that I’ve said before, and I will continue to say: this is wonderful and I wish that more writers would do this. You don’t need me to tell you that representation matters; this is something that you should know by now. The idea that a Pied Piper could be a young Latina woman is, frankly, brilliant. Look at this one character: Demi, the Piper in question, is a musical prodigy. She’s also described as being possibly the most powerful and potentially dangerous member of Henry’s field team. We need more brilliant, powerful musicians of color gracing the pages of our fiction, to say nothing of our television screens.
The novel’s origin as a serial means that there aren’t chapters, exactly. A new episode originally appeared on one’s Kindle each week until the story was complete. This means that there’s a tiny bit of repetition if you’re reading straight through. I wasn’t annoyed by this; I simply noticed that reading this as a novel instead of as individual episodes made for a different experience than my first go-round. It really does read like a television season. Each episode has its own smaller plot, until the larger story arc takes center stage in the latter few episodes, culminating in a season finale that as cinematic as a book can get. You can practically hear the music swelling as you read the final pages. If you’re a TV binge-watcher, take care with this book. It triggered my own habit: the book is over four hundred pages, and I devoured it in just under three days this time.
In Conclusion: I’m glad that I reread this. If you’re a fan of fairy tales and crime dramas, this might be the book for you. If you’re a fan of McGuire’s work and you’re patiently waiting for the next installment in your favorite series, this will more than satisfy the craving for more of her work. If you haven’t read McGuire’s work before, this is a good way to get a taste of her work to see if it might be to your liking, without the burden of a long series that needs time to find its footing. Either way, Indexing is worth your time.
Featured image by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash
I bought this as a serial and while at first I was a little meh on it, it really really grew on me. McGuire is great at setting up her world-building rules then making them pay off in interesting ways.
I have yet to read this. It’s waiting impatiently on my Kindle.
I so hope she’ll write a third book in that universe one of these years!