Once a wayward child, always a wayward child
Most of the students at Eleanor West’s school never find the door back to the land of their magical childhood adventures, but the Wolcott sisters are two of the lucky(?) ones. When we last saw them, Jacqueline was carrying the dead body of her twin sister Jillian through an impossible oak doorway, confident that she could use the lightning of the Moors to bring her back to life. Which is exactly what she did.
That…ended up being a huge mistake.
Seanan McGuire returns to the Wayward Children series with a tale of Vampire Plots, Drowned Gods, Mad Science, True Love, and why sometimes the only way to defeat a monster is to become an even bigger monster.
I had this idea after reading the other stories in the Wayward Children series that the novellas which start in Eleanor West’s school were the more lighthearted ones, while the stores that actually take place in the worlds behind the children’s doorways take on a much darker tone. This novella bucks that trend, because we start with a terrifying entry of a reanimated dead-woman into the school basement, and 
things only get more grim from there. Even the prose is more elaborately Gothic; it’s lush and dripping with adverbs to match the scenery of the empty Moors, the vampire castle, and the trauma that drove Jacqueline to ask her former classmates to break the cardinal rule of the school: No Quests.
It’s all done in the language of magic and science and lightning-powered experiments, but what Jack went through was – and is – a violation. She was betrayed by her sister, was forced to go along with Jillian’s plans after threats to her loved ones, and the fact that Jack has some kind of OCD or another that makes her ill at even the thought of contamination means that she spends most of the story hanging on to her sanity with her fingernails. Or trying to avoid clawing her own skin off to get away from what was done to her. This story is dark and gloomy and Jack knows that any solutions she finds aren’t going to be good ones, they’re just going to be slightly less bad than what she’s already going through.
“I could wash the skin from these hands and still be unable to stand the sight of them. How do I wash my blood? My organs? How do I scrub the sins from my sister’s skeleton?”
The presence of other members of Eleanor West’s school lightens things up slightly, although they do spend a lot of time reacting to how demanding and angry Jack can be. And I mean a lot of time. Pretty much every chapter, in fact. Former Goblin Prince Kade, currently bipedal mermaid Cora, and Christopher (who’s eternal love is in another world, and is also a skeleton) are determined to help their friend(?), but they’re also horrified at the whole concept of the Moors. It makes Jack’s obvious love for the horrible place seem that much sweeter, but I did wonder when the three students would stop being so surprised by this Stoker/Shelley/Lovecraft mashup.
“My girlfriend is a literal skeleton, and this is too creepy for me.”
Ah, but then there’s Sumi. Lovely Sumi, past (and future) princess of a Nonsense world, who was once murdered by Jack’s sister (but got better. It’s complicated.) I’ve never been so happy to have a character follow the comic-book trope of “death isn’t permanent”, because now that she’s back among the living she steals every scene. McGuire has captured the perfect combination of madcap and menace with her; she says everything that’s going through her mind at the moment, and I can’t tell if she isn’t scared by anything because her butterfly-and-candy mind won’t focus for that long, or because in her own way she’s scarier than anything she runs across.
“This is terrible,” said Sumi brightly. “I mean, we knew it was going to be terrible when we followed a mad scientist and her dead girlfriend to a horrifying murder world, but this is bonus terrible. This is the awful sprinkles on the sundae of doom.”
The rules of the Moors are a lot more complicated than I thought, and this is more than a story about revenge and defeating the monster in the castle. It touches on things like OCD (and how it’s can’t be solved by a simplistic “get over it” response), assault, the fallout from parents who try to force their children into a mold of what they should be rather than helping them find out what they actually are. But it’s also about true love, what we’re willing to put ourselves through for it, and digging deep down to find the strength to make a horrible decision when all of the choices are bad. It also gives me a little hope that some of the children in this series – maybe not all of them, but some – will eventually find the doorway to their childhood paradise.
Even if it’s a little slice of what everyone else thinks would be hell.
Make sure when you read this to pay special attention to the lovely illustrations by artist Rovina Cai. I especially liked the one of Jack confronting her sister at the castle.