TITLE: Spelunking Through Hell: A Visitor’s Guide to the Underworld (InCryptid Book 11)
AUTHOR: Seanan McGuire
352 pages, DAW Books, ISBN 9780756411831 (paperback, also in e-book and audio)
DESCRIPTION: (from the back cover): Love, noun:
1. An intense feeling of deep affection; may be romantic, filial or platonic.
Passion, noun:
1. A strong or barely controllable emotion.
2. Enthusiasm, interest, desire.
3. See also “obsession.”
It’s been fifty years since the crossroads caused the disappearance of Thomas Price, and his wife, Alice, has been trying to find him and bring him home ever since, despite the increasing probability that he’s no longer alive for her to find. Now that the crossroads have been destroyed, she’s redoubling her efforts. It’s time to bring him home, dead or alive.
Preferably alive, of course, but she’s tired, and at this point, she’s not that picky. It’s a pan-dimensional crash course in chaos, as Alice tries to find the rabbit hole she’s been missing for all these decades—the one that will take her to the man she loves.
Who are her allies? Who are her enemies? And if she manages to find him, will he even remember her at this point?
It’s a lot for one cryptozoologist to handle.
MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5
MY THOUGHTS: Spelunking Through Hell, the eleventh book in Seanan McGuire’s InCryptid series chronicling the adventures of a family of cryptozoologists (the Prices), is an action-packed emotional rollercoaster that caps off a long-running subplot and bodes a momentous change in the family’s status quo going forward. Oh, and it just happens to be the first book in the series narrated by nominal family matriarch Alice Price-Healy.
I say “nominal” because in the preceding ten novels, Alice has been more conspicuous in her absence and its effect on her children and grandchildren than in her presence. She’s been travelling between dimensions in search of her stolen husband, and that has absolutely put a strain on her relationship with her descendants. Most of the important things that have happened in this series? Alice has been absent for, and whoever is narrating a particular book (grandchildren Verity, Alex, and Antimony; extended family member Sarah) usually comments on it. It’s been an effective way to build interest in Alice and her quest, a great slow boil sub-plot that finally pays off as we get to see Alice in her element and hear her voice.
And that voice is straightforward, no nonsense. Alice is committed to her path. She will find her lost husband if it kills her (and it comes pretty darn close several times), even if it damages her familial relationships (as we know it has), even if it means she never returns to Earth (a distinct possibility). We’ve seen this commitment, this willingness to risk all for the right cause, in her grandkids – especially Antimony – so clearly Alice has been an influence on them. But it becomes clear there is so much Alice has not told her loved ones, that she has done Things of Which the Family would Not Approve (as the Aeslin mice would say, pronouncing all those capital letters along the way). Those things are just the latest trauma that has made Alice the woman she is.
This book is a wild adventure with fight scenes galore and fascinating world-building (the way dimensions work and dimensional travel happens is fascinating and not like any other version of such I’ve read) but it is also a treatise on the way repeated trauma informs who we are as well as how we can become inured to it. Those who have read the short stories chronicling Alice’s childhood, teen, and college years on McGuire’s website and Patreon know just how much emotional and physical trauma Alice has experienced: several near-death experiences, the loss of her mother at an early age (which also caused her father to become emotionally distant and controlling), the later violent losses of the grandparents who helped raise her as well as her father, and of course the taking of her husband by the Crossroads. Any one of those events is traumatic enough to cause one to seek therapy; a lifetime of them would be more than many of us would survive. Alice could not rescue her parents or grandparents, so rescuing her husband becomes not just a goal, but a mission, an obsession. As long as she’s focused on that, she can justify the further trauma she experiences, both self-inflicted (abandoning her son and daughter to the care of family friends, as well as something else I won’t spoil because it’s a major plot point) and inflicted by others (she starts the novel with another near-death experience). I haven’t been through anywhere near as much trauma as Alice has, but I recognized some of the language she uses and some of her coping mechanisms as similar to my own. McGuire understands trauma, understands coping mechanisms, and understands that sometimes the latter fail and we’re left raw. And she does not back away from or soften those moments. Nor should she.
If there’s a downside to this book, it’s a minor one: because Alice spends most of her time (and thus most of the book) away from Earth, any on-going plots regarding the Price family’s relationships and danger from the Covenant get put on hold. It’s a little jarring at first, but McGuire has more than earned the opportunity to veer off from the main narrative to finally tell the story she’s been anxious to tell from the start. It’s not a total disconnect, as events from the previous books are mentioned – especially those of Antimony’s novels which had a direct effect on Alice’s decisions at the start of this book.
The book also contains a novella that chronicles a key moment in Alice and Thomas’ shared past. It is both sweet and horrific at the same time. Which is something Seanan McGuire does so well.
I received an electronic advance reading copy for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. Spelunking Through Hell releases on March 1, 2022.