Installment Immortality by Seanan McGuire (Incryptid #14)
After four generations of caring for the Price family, Mary Dunlavy has more than earned a break from the ongoing war with the Covenant of St. George. Instead, what she's getting is a new employer in the form of the anima mundi, Earth's living soul made manifest, and a new assignment: to hunt down the Covenant agents on the East Coast and make them stop imprisoning America's ghosts.
All in a day's work for a phantom nanny, even one who'd really rather be teaching her youngest charges how to read.
One ghost can't take on the entire Covenant without backup, which is how she winds up on a road trip with the still-mourning Elsie and the slowly collapsing Arthur, both of whom are reeling in their own way from the loss of their mother. New allies and new enemies await in Worcester, Massachusetts, where the path of the haunting leads.
With the anima mundi demanding results and Mary's newfound freedom at stake, it's down to Mary to make sure that everyone gets out of this adventure alive.
It's been a long afterlife, but Mary Dunlavy's not ready to be exorcised quite yet.
PUBLISHER: Tor Books
YEAR: 2025
LENGTH: 432 pages
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Fantasy
RECOMMENDED: Highly
Queer Rep Summary: Lesbian/Sapphic Secondary Character(s), Ace/Aro Secondary Character(s).
*I received a free review copy in exchange for an honest review of this book.
Another excellent entry in a great series, INSTALLMENT IMMORTALITY shows the shape of what an afterlife can be, exploring grief and moving on, lingering in the messiness of mourning.
INSTALLMENT IMMORTALITY picks up several months after the Price-Healy's attack on the xenophobic Covenant of St. George. Now with recent deaths on both sides, the Covenant has intensified their efforts to hunt down and destroy cryptids in North America, justifying their accelerationism by holding up their dead as martyrs to the cause. The Price-Healy's are in shock that Jane and Mary are really gone, and even Mary's reappearance isn't enough to shake them out of their stupor. Mary, for her part, finds herself under the purview of the Anima Mundi instead of the Crossroads, and is ready to negotiate whatever terms will let her keep watching over her family.
As a sequel, INSTALLMENT IMMORTALITY is the second book narrated by Mary Dunlavy -- babysitting ghost and one-time employee of the crossroads. The Incryptid series swaps out narrators fairly frequently, but the events of the last book were so traumatic that only someone already dead would be able to focus and react to the next phase of the crisis. Even then, Mary finds out that she's been gone for several months, having sort of been exploded at the end of AFTERMARKET AFTERLIFE. The Anima Mundi gives her a chance to keep some of the powers the Crossroads used to grant her, abilities she'd relied on to watch over the geographically dispersed Price-Healy's. Elsie, daughter of Jane, wants revenge against the Covenant for killing her mother, and she joins Mary for the cross-country journey.
Mary finally takes the time to dig into something that has been true for a while, but that the other characters either hadn't taken the time to examine or weren't ready to accept: Artie is dead. He never came back from being transported to another dimension with Sarah. There is a consciousness (Arthur) walking around in his body, but Artie is gone and there's no way to get him back. Even if some solution could be found to restore Artie, there doesn't seem to be one that could preserve both Artie and Arthur. Arthur is a collection of other people's memories of a person he's never been, and he's slowly losing his cobbled-together self because there's no core to hold him together. Traveling with Mary and Elsie to fight the Covenant is his chance to do something as Arthur that's all his own.
I love the focus on ghosts, and the way Mary's perspective changes the way that information is conveyed. Though she's traveling with Arthur and Elsie, she spends a lot of time at the destination with the local ghosts, getting an idea of the spectral perspective on the Covenant's actions. The types of ghosts are shaped by sapient (usually human) concepts of identity and what was important to them in life, but that also means the various types of ghosts are ways of understanding how people have manifested in their afterlives, it is not a set menu of options. INSTALLMENT IMMORTALITY makes this descriptive nature more obvious as Mary finds out how other ghosts are spending their afterlives, as she is much freer to travel than most.
This isn't entirely a new storyline, as the exciting incidents happened in previous books and things have been built towards this for a while, but the shape of the particular problem is new, and I like how it turns out. Several major things are introduced then, at least a few of them are resolved. As this is not the end of the series, it leaves some things to be handled later, including, but not limited to a new generation of Price children. Mary's view of events is very different from any previous narrators, partly due to her position as someone who haunts a living family as a babysitting ghost. She's tied to the youngest of each generation but never stops thinking of even the adults as people she wants to protect.
I don't think the series would make much sense to anyone who tried to jump in here as their introduction to Incryptid. INSTALLMENT IMMORTALITY is very much a book of what comes next, dealing with consequences for things that have been building throughout the series. AFTERMARKET AFTERLIFE is a much better choice for those who don't want to go back too far but are interested in the series. For a little more background, SPELUNKING THROUGH HELL (#11) for TRICKS FOR FREE (#7) would be good options for a midway start, given how important Alice and Annie are to AFTERMARKET AFTERLIFE, which is itself foundational to INSTALLMENT IMMORTALITY. If you like long series, consider going all the way back to the start of the Incryptid with DISCOUNT ARMAGEDDON.
If you like this you may like:
- Bitter Medicine by Mia Tsai
- Angel of the Overpass by Seanan McGuire
Graphic/Explicit CW for grief, blood, gore, violence, body horror, death.
Moderate CW for cursing, sexism, pregnancy, injury detail, torture, parental death.
Minor CW for cancer.
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