Late Eclipses

Late Eclipses is the 4th instalment of Seanan McGuire’s Toby Daye Urban Fantasy series, chronicling the adventures of the changeling PI cum knight errant of the Shadowed Hills fae duchy.

As has become common with the books it begins in this world with Toby enjoying the fruits of her most recent case and sharing them with her Fetch and roommate May (May Daye, get it?) and her friend taxi driver/bridge troll and barghest fancier Danny, but with Toby trouble in Shadowed Hills, and the other faery knowes around her home town of San Francisco are never far away, and before she knows what is happening she’s been made the Lady of Goldengreen and her friend Lily the Undine and ruler of the Tea Gardens knowe is deathly ill.

The local queen, the Queen of Mists doesn’t much like Toby, in fact she seems to feel threatened by the feisty changeling, so why would she give her a position like Lady of Goldengreen? Probably because once Toby has accepted it, and she can’t very well refuse, she becomes beholden to the Queen and can no longer be protected as she has been for most of her life by her friend Duke Sylvester Torquill of Shadowed Hills. That’s problem number one. A bigger problem and mystery is the sickness that has afflicted Lily. Full bloods don’t generally die and certainly not from sicknesses like Lily seems to have contracted, and undines are even longer lived than most full bloods. Toby smells a rat, or more specifically a flower, namely oleander. As well as being the name of a shrub; oleander is also the name of the vindictive part peri Oleander de Merelands, a creature who was one half of the attack that robbed Toby of 14 years of her life and cost her human husband and her daughter. While Toby desperately tries to find a way to heal Lily and make a contingency plan for her largely helpless subjects, Luna Torquill, Duchess of the Shadowed Hills, and the wife of Sylvester also sickens. Taking advantage of the power vacuum left by the grief stricken Sylvester, who is now by his wife’s bedside night and day, his crazy daughter Rayseline takes control and lays the blame for everything right at Toby’s feet, thus delivering her into the hands of the Queen of Mist to pronounce sentence. Toby is going to have to escape imprisonment, find a cure and a killer and prove at the same time she’s not mad, that Oleander de Merelands is behind the whole thing and somehow get out of it all alive.

Seanan McGuire has created a great heroine in Toby, she’s made the shadowy world of the fae that exists alongside our own, rich, varied and very real, the books are building up a great roster of characters that she can draw on as and when she needs them and readers are already picking their favourites amongst the cast. May and Danny tend to feature high on many lists, as does Toby’s on again off again love interest Tybalt King of Cats and her former ‘boyfriend’ selkie Connor, now inconveniently married to Rayseline. My own personal favourite is the young Daoine Sidhe page Quentin, and he too has a cameo in Late Eclipses. Late Eclipses was the first appearance of Walther; the Tylwyth Teg chemist, I suspect it will not be the last.

Seanan is proving to be somewhat of a literary chameleon with this series, so far she’s written them in a noirish Chandleresque style, something reminiscent of Agatha Christie and now Late Eclipses which has elements of a Grisham type legal thriller.

Another kudo I have to give to Seanan is character development. I know I’m in the minority of fans in that I don’t particularly like Tybalt. Everyone else seems to want he and Toby to get together. I still don’t want that to happen and while I’d like to see them become reluctant allies I don’t have any desire to see them become lovers, but I have to admit that parts of this story made me feel for Tybalt and I even started to respect and like the guy…uh cat. To make me revise my opinion this far in, well that takes talent, something Seanan McGuire is rapidly proving that she has in spades.

Late Eclipses is another welcome addition to Toby’s exploits and while it ties everything up at the end, there’s plenty of scope and there are still a plethora of enemies out there who have a score to settle with Toby, I’d also personally like to find out more about Toby’s mother Amandine. One Salt Sea; the fifth Toby book, is due out in September and I’ll be adding it to the collection.

And they wonder why people shop online

Borders and Angus & Robertson down here in Australia are going through the same problems that they are everywhere else. Here they’re blaming it on online sales. I’m going to bring up a case in point and that may explain exactly why they’re not getting the business they want, at least from the growing community of SFF readers.

It’s not easy being an SFF fan in Australia. It never has been. You mention that you read the genre and you get blank looks most of the time. Once you try to explain you have to use something that has broken out of the genre to most people (eg: Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter) and then they either think you’re a role player or someone who’s never really grown up. I contest that Harry Potter is more than just a kids series, but I digress.

If something sells well enough, and by that I mean it has to best sell, then it may find it’s way into the mainstream stores, otherwise you have to visit one of the few speciality SFF stores, like Minotaur books in Melbourne. The only other way is to go online. I know I can buy e-books, and I do have an e-reader, but the range of SFF books available for legal download in Australia is depressingly limited, I can also go online and I do when I want something hard to get, but I’m a relatively old fashioned character and I like to go into a shop, find the book I want, pick up a solid copy of it and take it home with me.

Onto my specific example. One of the rising stars of urban fantasy is the prolific Seanan McGuire. I first encountered Seanan at Aussiecon, and seeing her there was one of the highlights of the event for me. After the con I started following her LJ and found out that she had 4 books in print (3 October Daye’s under her name, the 3rd was released just after the convention, and the 1st of the Newsflesh trilogy released under her pseudonym of Mira Grant. On that please read Feed, it’s awesome), so I went to hunt them out. I was lucky enough to snag a signed copy of Feed at Minotaur, but the Toby Daye’s were nowhere to be seen. In desperation I tried a chain, and lo and behold Dymocks in the city had all 3. Dymocks is the ONLY chain in this country that carries a decent SFF range and it has it’s own dedicated urban fantasy/paranormal romance section, at least the city branch does.

Being a relatively new kid on the block and steadily making her way as a mid list author Seanan is great about letting her readers know what she’s up to, especially with things like release dates. Her 4th October Daye novel; Late Eclipses was due out on March 3rd (that’s the US March 3rd, so it was probably March 4th down here in Oz), now I’m not stupid enough to expect it down here on day of release, although it has happened in the past with some titles, but I think a week is a respectable wait, if I’d ordered it online I would have well and truly had it. I tried Dymocks, nada, I tried Minotaur, no luck. My final port of call was Science & Swords. Science & Swords is this tiny little store in an out of the way arcade that only the truly dedicated even know about.

They had one copy left, as he rang it up the salesman remarked on how popular the series was and that they had already put in an order for more copies which should be arriving the following week, so why isn’t it and many other titles available for purchase in major Australian book stores within a week of release? I don’t care if it’s a publisher thing (Seanan’s publisher for the Toby Daye’s; DAW, is unlikely to have an Australian distributor, but considering that DAW is a subsidiary of publishing giant Penguin, which does have an Australian arm, these days, it shouldn’t be that hard to do) or a bookstore thing, but I’m getting fed up with it and I don’t believe I’m alone. If those at Borders Australia and Angus & Robertson wonder why they’re losing business to their online competitors this is one very good reason, the dreadful overpricing they engage in and the staggering lack of knowledge displayed by staff are 2 other reasons.

I thank the God of booklovers for places like Science & Swords. Thanks for listening. Now I’m off to devour Late Eclipses.