I’ve just finished last year’s Discount Armegeddon, the first InCryptid novel by Seanan McGuire. This is an urban fantasy about Verity Price, a dancer/waitress/cryptozoologist. She is in NYC entering dance competitions, supporting herself working as a waitress at a strip club, and trying to decide whether to return to the family business.
This was my first book by this author and I will definitely be coming back for more.
This book is a light-hearted romp through the streets, rooftops, and sewers of New York, but not devoid of serious concepts. Verity’s official job is to assist the cryptid population, protecting them from humans and vice versa. The first chapter is her tracking down a ghoul that has been feasting on human girls he picks up at nightclubs. Some have objected to her releasing him with only a ‘stern warning’ and an order to leave town, but I understand her following family policy.
Speaking of family, the Price family has been in hiding for four generations from the Covenant of St. George, an organization dedicated to wiping out all cryptids (they think of them as monsters, where the Price family thinks of them as creatures that fit in the ecosystem), wherever encountered. The Prices left the Covenant when they discovered some unsettling truths. The Covenant has tried several times to wipe out the family of “traitors” and luckily believes they had done so some time ago.
Unluckily, Dominic DeLuca, a member of the Covenant is in NYC on his first solo assignment. Inevitably the monster hunter and the monster conservationist conflict over the proper state of the monsters: dead or alive.
But when young, female cryptids of various species start disappearing, the two must join forces for someone is performing a ritual designed to wake up a dragon, long thought extinct by both the Prices and the Covenant, a dragon sleeping somewhere below the sewers of New York.
The writing is good, the characters are memorable, and the action fast-paced and exciting. A good book to get pulled into.
“There’s no such thing as a normal life. Some lives are just more interesting than others, and we shouldn’t judge people for being boring.” –Evelyn Price