Seanan McGuire's New York Times best-selling and Hugo Award-nominated urban fantasy InCryptid series continues with the 13th book following the Price family, cryptozoologists who study and protect the creatures living in secret all around us.
Mary Dunlavy didn't intend to become a professional babysitter. Of course, she didn't intend to die, either, or to become a crossroads ghost. As a babysitting ghost, she's been caring for the Price family for four generations, and she's planning to keep doing the job for the better part of forever.
With her first charge finally back from her decades-long cross-dimensional field trip, with a long-lost husband and adopted daughter in tow, it's time for Mary to oversee the world's most chaotic family reunion. And that's before the Covenant of St. George launches a full-scale strike against the cryptids of Manhattan, followed quickly by an attack on the Campbell Family Carnival.
It's going to take every advantage and every ally they have for the Prices to survive what's coming—and for Mary, to avoid finding out the answer to a question she's never wanted to know: What happens to a babysitting ghost if she loses the people she's promised to protect?
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8 books in catalog
The sprawling urban fantasy realm of Faerie and modern San Francisco collides in Rosemary and Rue, the debut novel that launched the long-running October Daye series. Author Seanan McGuire has built an extensive bibliography spanning urban fantasy, dark portal fantasy, sci-fi horror, and cryptozoology, earning multiple Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Alex Awards across her prolific career.
Writing under her own name as well as pseudonyms such as Mira Grant and A. Deborah Baker, McGuire has become one of the most versatile voices in contemporary speculative fiction. Her award-winning portal fantasy novella Every Heart a Doorway inaugurated the acclaimed Wayward Children series, examining the psychological aftermath of children who return to the mundane world after visiting magical realms.
Seanan McGuire was born on January 5, 1978, in Martinez, California, and raised in a wide variety of locations, many of which boasted dangerous native wildlife. She studied folklore and herpetology at the University of California, Berkeley, an academic foundation that directly influenced her later fiction. Before writing full-time, her diverse career path included working as a phone sex operator, a technical support engineer, an exotic animal rescuer, a process engineer for the communications company SBC, and a quality assurance engineer for a non-profit organization. Despite an almost magnetic attraction to venomous creatures and strange mishaps, she survived long enough to acquire a typewriter and begin submitting stories, noting humorously that surviving late-night typing at three o'clock in the morning was as notable as surviving her encounters with swamp wildlife.
McGuire was active in science fiction and fantasy fandom before establishing her professional literary career, earning wide recognition as a filksinger. She has recorded multiple CDs of her original filk music—including her Hugo Award-nominated album Wicked Girls—and won several Pegasus Awards for her songwriting. In addition to music, she is a cartoonist who drew the irregularly posted autobiographical web comic With Friends Like These... and created numerous original art cards. In 2010, McGuire won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. That same year, her medical horror novel Feed, published under the pseudonym Mira Grant, was named one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2010. In 2013, she achieved a historic milestone by becoming the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo Award ballot, a feat she repeated in 2022.
Residing in the Pacific Northwest—specifically Seattle—McGuire shares her home with her cats, Alice and Thomas, a vast collection of horror movies, creepy dolls, and enough books to qualify her living space as a fire hazard. Her background in blurb-writing for convention program books established her habit of writing biographical entries in the third person. Outside of writing, her interests include long walks in swamps, reality television, comic books, collecting pennies, and watching horror films, famously using Kenneth Muir's Horror Films of the 1980s as a personal checklist. She also maintains strongly held beliefs regarding the X-Men, the history of the Black Death, and the practical necessity of chainsaws in daily life.
McGuire's writing style blends deep folklore traditions with modern genre sensibilities, often incorporating detailed biological and ecological concepts derived from her herpetology and folklore studies. Her urban fantasy series, such as the October Daye books and the InCryptid series, combine procedural investigations with intricate mythical worldbuilding and cryptozoology. Writing dark science fiction and horror under the pseudonym Mira Grant, she explores epidemiological threats, parasite infections, and deep-sea terror with technical rigor. She also utilizes the pen name A. Deborah Baker for her Up-and-Under children's portal fantasy series.
A recurring theme across McGuire's work is the exploration of trauma, belonging, and alternative family structures among outcast characters. In her Wayward Children novellas, she examines the emotional and psychological displacement experienced by youth ejected from fantastical worlds where they finally felt complete. Her narratives frequently focus on resilience, monster biology, ethical dilemmas surrounding science and magic, and the absurdities of survival, reflected in her signature wit and sharp dialogue.
InCryptid
