Midnight Blue-Light Special (2013)
Written by: Seanan McGuire
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Length: 10 hours and 56 minutes (Audiobook)
Series: InCryptid (Book #2)
Publisher: Audible Studios
Why I Chose It: I am staff on a new speculative media convention called MultiverseCon (shameless plug! Come visit us in Atlanta in October!). Seanan McGuire is our Author Guest of Honor, which I’m super-excited about. While I’d read some shorts by Seanan and have been on panels with her at conventions, I’d never actually read any of her novels. I decided I needed to remedy that.
I began with Discount Armageddon last month. And here we are with Book Two!
The premise:
Normal, adjective: Conforming to the standard or common type. See also “ordinary.”
Abnormal, adjective: Deviating from the common type, such as playing monster-human on the rooftops of Manhattan. See also “Verity Price.”
The Price family has spent generations studying the monsters of the world, working to protect them from humanity — and to protect humanity from them. Verity Price is just trying to do her job, keeping the native cryptid population of Manhattan from getting into trouble, and doing a little ballroom dancing on the side.
Enter Dominic De Luca, an operative for the Covenant of St. George, and Verity’s on-again, off-again boyfriend. When he tells her that the Covenant is sending a full team to assess how ready the city is for a purge, Verity finds herself between a rock and a hard place. Stay, and risk her almost-certain death, or flee, and leave the cryptids of New York with nothing between them and the Covenant.
With allies and enemies on every side, and no safe way to turn, it’s going to take some quickstepping for Verity to waltz out of this one. There’s just one question on everyone’s mind: Is this the last dance for Verity Price?
Some character spoilers.
Discussion: Often, a sophomore book in a series doesn’t live up to the first book. Because this is common, I tend not to have as high hopes for the second book. But, happily, that is not at all true of this series!
In my review of the InCryptid Series Book One, Discount Armageddon, I mentioned how much I really liked the world that Seanan McGuire built in this series. That has not changed at all. I still love this world, but I have to say that I liked Book Two even more.
In Midnight Blue-Light Special, we’re with Verity again, only this time, the Covenant of Saint George are coming to town. The same Covenant that thinks Verity’s family are traitors and want to kill them on sight. This puts Dominic, her on-again-off-again boyfriend, in a precarious position: be true to his Covenant vow or be true to his feelings for Verity. Especially when the Covenant make it to New York and one of them is…
Well, I won’t spoil any of that for you.
What I really liked about this book was how much more time we got to spend with Verity’s people — her chosen family. In the last book, we learned she worked as a waitress in a strip club called Dave’s Fish & Strips which is run by a dirtbag bogeyman. In this book, the joint has been taken over by his niece and she’s turned it into something more like a steampunk burlesque club.
Istas works at the club and is a waheela — a type of shapeshifter — alternating between being a human Intuit woman (who dresses in Lolita fashion) and something like a were-bear. We got glimpses of her in Book One, but she’s much more present in this novel. And Istas is funny. Because her more natural state is the were-bear, she doesn’t have the more delicate human… sensibilities. Especially with her love of carnage. And her lack of understanding of humans’ aversion to it. And being corrected by her boyfriend, Ryan (who is a tanuki, another form of shapeshifter), to limit her references to carnage to once per conversation.
Another character we’re with a lot more is Sarah, Verity’s cousin (but not by blood). She is a cuckoo, a cryptid of a dangerous sort. She is telepathic and can influence people as a defense mechanism, or take them over altogether. Her species is the most dangerous in the world. But Sarah lacks the sociopathological tendencies of her species, due to being raised well away from the cuckoos who prey on humans.
I like Sarah a lot. She is an introverted math geek who likes ketchup in her drinks. She also doesn’t ever have to pay for anything and really just wants to be left alone. In Book Two, Sarah plays a big part of the plot and even gets a few of her own point-of-view chapters. Those were probably some of my favorite parts of the book. I find her to be fascinating. (I’m looking forward to reading the free short story Seanan has on her website about Sarah and Arthur, another of Verity’s cousins-not-by-blood. You can find all Seanan’s InCryptid shorts here!)
And, of course, the Aeslin Mice are in their full, fanatically ecstatic glory. They are the sect of fanatically religious sentient mice who’ve taken the Price family on as their objects of worship. I mentioned in my other review that I adore these little guys and their titles for each of the members of the Price family and those in their orbit. One of the names they’d tried on for Dominic is “the God of Absolutely Never Smiling, No, Not Ever.” So now you know why I love them.
In Conclusion: Overall, this story felt much more weighty than Book One, because of having to face the Covenant. The first book set them up as big enough and scary enough that just them coming to town felt huge. So the whole book seems heavier in that way. I think that contributed to my liking it so much. I still have the same issues with the editorial stuff as I did in the first book (all the blinking; still), but, again, it isn’t enough to keep me from continuing to read!
Have you read the InCryptid series? Thoughts?
If you haven’t, what are your thoughts on the second book of a series? Do you find them to meet the bar set by the first book or do they disappoint?
[…] continues reviewing Seanan McGuire’s InCryptid series with a look at book two, Midnight Blue-Light Special. Verity Price is back, helping humans and […]