Seanan McGuire returns to her popular Wayward Children series with Down Among the Sticks and Bones—a truly standalone story suitable for adult and young adult readers of urban fantasy, and the follow-up to the Alex, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award-winning, World Fantasy Award finalist, Tiptree Honor List book Every Heart a Doorway
Twin sisters Jack and Jill were seventeen when they found their way home and were packed off to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children.
This is the story of what happened first…
Jacqueline was her mother’s perfect daughter—polite and quiet, always dressed as a princess. If her mother was sometimes a little strict, it’s because crafting the perfect daughter takes discipline.
Jillian was her father’s perfect daughter—adventurous, thrill-seeking, and a bit of a tom-boy. He really would have preferred a son, but you work with what you've got.
They were five when they learned that grown-ups can’t be trusted.
They were twelve when they walked down the impossible staircase and discovered that the pretense of love can never be enough to prepare you a life filled with magic in a land filled with mad scientists and death and choices.
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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.
Wayward Children
