Aftermarket Afterlife is the 13th book in Seanan McGuire’s InCryptid series of urban fantasy stories about the Price family of cryptozoologists. It is far from the point you should start reading the series, despite being an excellent entry in the series.Mary Dunlavy has been a recurring character since the opening volume of the series, the ghost acting as babysitter to the Price children for a few generations at the point when the series begins. This is the first time she’s been a viewpoint character for a book (rather than one continuous main protagonist, each book rides with one member of the family, with Verity, Alex, Antimony, and Alice Price and Sarah Zellaby having been viewpoint protagonists before this story). The book opens with Mary settling back into her role as babysitter to a new generation of Prices as the family enters a relatively peaceful period.Which of course means that we enter the “Oh no! It’s the consequences of our actions!” portion of the book pretty quick as the Covenant of St. George, a group of monster hunters attack multiple locations associated with the family. And now Mary has to figure out whether she can continue to protect her family.I love McGuire’s writing and this one is no different. The pacing is snappy, except when it purposefully isn’t. The banter between characters is fantastic. I just really liked this one.Something to Take AwayWhile reading this, I kept getting the idea to run another game of Monster of the Week or to run something else where you have human protagonists, but like InCryptid does have intelligent non-human life with non-human goals and motivations but mostly in a non-hostile way.Like the gorgons in InCryptid, they have certain effects on people around them, so they tend to cluster just outside the human habitations and keep to themselves. They’re not actively hostile most of the time, and they have their own stuff they are working on. Maybe something like a hex crawl or something set in Eberron where you meet some of the Daask or people from Droaam who belong to the “monstrous” species. That interaction in these books has been something I’ve liked since I first read Discount Armageddon.
