TITLE: Sparrow Hill Road (#1 Ghost Stories)
AUTHOR: Seanan McGuire
GENRE: Urban Fantasy
PUBLISHED: 06/05/2014
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism
Review: Fact: very nearly all of Seanan McGuire’s books have the X Factor. That nameless, irresistible spark that makes a story intensely readable and very, very hard to put down. So far, I’ve only come across one of her works that didn’t click for me, and Sparrow Hill Road is not that book.
Even if it is a bit of a leap from her previous works, it’s a very, very enjoyable leap. Set in the same world as the InCryptid series, Sparrow Hill Road features one Rose Marshall, a young woman who’s been hitch-hiking across the USA and back again for years.
But the first thing you’ll want to know about Rose is that she died in 1952.
McGuire has written a ghost story – really, a series of ghost stories, since the book is made up of numerous short stories or novellas – from the perspective of the ghost. In fact she’s actually gone one step further and recreated an urban legend, because Rose is the Phantom Prom Date, the girl who died on her way to prom and now appears as a ghostly hitch-hiker, trying to make her way back home. That’s the story, anyway. The reality is a fair bit more complicated than that.
There are not many books that consider American mythology. I don’t mean Native American mythology (although there is not nearly enough of that either) but the USA’s own brand of magic. Most urban fantasies set in the US feature vampires and werewolves and maybe faeries, none of which are native to North America’s mythos. Off the top of my head, I can only think of Gemma Files’ Hexslinger series and Emma Bulls’ Territory that come anywhere close to incorporating the particular brand of folk-magic that is unique to the Caucasian/Aryan settlers of North America. (Both are excellent reads, by the way, and I recommend them heartily). Sparrow Hill Road does not look back – well, not that far back – into America’s past, but instead it goes one better: this is a book about the USA’s modern mythology. It’s about the truckers and highways and the diners, and it takes those things and weaves a new folklore out of them – cars that come alive (don’t worry, not in the Transformer sense), undead roads that don’t need a haunting to kill, a vinyl-and-chrome diner that’s never where you left it but always there when you need it, and witches who pay tribute to a highway that’s gone but never dead (and might just be a goddess in her own right). Persephone and Hades shimmer in the background even if no one’s all that sure that gods exist, and a hitcher is the best kind of ghost to be.
And there are many kinds of ghost. McGuire has put quite a bit of thought into this world, and I love it. Rose is a hitcher, a ghost who can become human again for a night if she’s given a gift; she’s also a psychopomp, a spirit who guides the dead to their rest and sometimes manages to keep the nearly-dead from dying at all. On her travels she meets many other kinds of spirit, not all of them friendly and some quite dangerous, such as the spirits of the crossroads. Not your normal crossroads, but the place where you can sell your soul or someone else’s for just about anything you want.
However, Rose’s unlife is not just hitching lifts and trying to prevent car accidents that aren’t meant to happen. She has a mission of her own beyond the call of the twilight realm, and that’s stopping the man who killed her all those decades ago: Bobby Cross, a man who murders to fuel his own eternal youth. Surely that’s bad enough, but what made me sick is that Bobby devours or destroys the souls of his victims, instead of ‘just’ killing them. I have a huge thing about souls, and it’s unbelievably unfair and horrific to me when something other than a person’s own actions can affect their soul. There’s no faster way to make me turn on a character than by having them mess with someone else’s soul, but Bobby does plenty more to convince those without this hang-up of mine that he is not a nice guy. I’ll leave that for you to discover when you read the book, however.
As I mentioned, Sparrow Hill Road is made up of a series of short stories set during Rose’s unlife. They are not in chronological order, but I quite liked the effect of this; it made it easier to identify with Rose and the strange ‘twilight’ that she spends most of her time in – a ghostly dimension one step below and to the side of the living ‘daylight’ world. The whole book has a feel reminiscent of the tv show Supernatural’s earlier seasons, albeit much less violent; Rose is not any kind of slayer or hunter, but a normal girl who’s proved smart enough and stubborn enough to survive the ghost world. So far, at least.
It’s not that the book is dreamy or slow; if anything, I thought it was a bit rushed at times. Several of the stories could have been lengthened a little more; some of the endings and resolutions happened very suddenly, without enough build-up. But that’s a very small quibble when compared to turns of phrase like this...
The hours tick by like seasons, endlessly long and strange.
The final bell rang like Gabriel’s trumpet, and students poured out of classrooms like angels answering the call to war.
the palimpsest skin of America
It’s that palimpsest that McGuire has captured oh-so-perfectly in this book about modern magic and urban legends. It’s not a stand-alone – we’ll be seeing more of Rose, and I can only hope it’s soon, because she’s one of my favourite female characters to walk off the page this year. 30% of the way into the novel, I went to Amazon and bought my own copy, because this is a book and series (and author!) I very much want to support. I think, if you decide to read it, that you’ll see why very quickly – and hopefully enjoy it as much as I did!
