Long Way From Home
Seanan McGuire
An incremental advance
Long Way from Home is Seanan McGuire's January 2022 Patreon reward story. It's the latest installment in the saga of Alice Healy and Thomas Price. I found myself disappointed. Halfway Through the Wood was a really splendid story, and School Belles notably advanced the story. But this one barely moves the plot past where we left it in School Belles.
Let's recap. In Halfway Through the Wood Thomas made a bargain with the Crossroads to save Alice's life. As a consequence of this bargain Thomas is to be taken gradually from this world. In School Belles Alice went to Ann Arbor to study library science at the University of Michigan and Thomas became confined to his house. In principle Alice and Thomas could still stay in touch via the mail. However, because Thomas can't get out of his house he relies on Alice's father Jonathan to pick up his mail. And Jonathan, who has always seen Thomas as The Enemy, is not acting in good faith. He is stopping all communication between Alice and Thomas. In fact, he is also stopping Alice's mail to her grandfather, Jonathan's father Alexander.
We know that in the long run Alice and Thomas will get together. The family trees in the Incryptid novels tell us that Alice and Thomas will marry in 1960, and that Alice will have two children by Thomas: Kevin in 1962 and Jane in 1965. Sarah tells us in Imaginary Numbers:
We lost Grandpa [Thomas]. Not to death, which would have been understandable and ordinary and something we might have been able to collectively get over. No, I mean we lost him, through a hole in the wall of the world that swallowed him down in the middle of the night while Grandma Alice was pregnant with my Aunt Jane, whose impending arrival was the only thing that prevented Grandma from immediately jumping into the hole and going after him. As soon as she’d recovered from labor, she’d dumped both her children on our Aunt Laura, yet another in the string of aunts, uncles, and cousins who aren’t actually biologically related to us.
Dad and Aunt Jane grew up essentially as wards of the Campbell Family Carnival, and I know that Aunt Jane at least still considers the carnies more her family than her own mother. Grandma has never been able to regain ground with her biological children, even though all us grandkids love her desperately. So in a way, the crossroads cost us both of them.
We also know that after Jane's birth Alice gave up ordinary life in the everyday world to become a Thomas-hunting world-walker. We can expect further clarity on the Alice and Thomas story when Spelunking Through Hell comes out in March 2022.
I had been hoping in this story to move toward the point where Thomas and Alice could get close enough to each other to start making babies. But we don't. There is a small advance in the plot in this story, which I will not spoil, but it is tiny. We still don't know how Alice and Thomas are going to get together.