Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day (Seanan McGuire)

Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day
Seanan McGuire
Tordotcom
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: It was 1972 when teenager Jenna's older sister Patty, who had left small town Mill Hollow, Kentucky to chase big city dreams in New York City, returned home in a wooden box, having ended her own life. Ravaged by grief and guilt, Jenna ran out into the stormy night - and over the edge of a ravine, leaving a broken body to wash downriver.
But death was not the end of Jenna.
In 2015, Jenna has settled into existence in Manhattan, one of numerous ghosts who dwell in the vast city. Like other ghosts, she barters in time - time borrowed from mortals and time paid back. Once she has repaid her debt to the cosmos, the difference between when she actually died and when she was destined to die, she can pass on to whatever comes after this world, a place where Patty must be waiting for her kid sister. Able to take on corporeal form for a limited time each day, she has a job at a coffee shop and volunteers at a suicide prevention hot line (where every life saved earns her some credit), and has an apartment where she looks after aging cats: the sort of life Patty might once have aspired to if her depression hadn't driven her to suicide. Jenna had hoped to go on like this for as long as it takes to balance the spiritual books and earn her release... until the other ghosts in the city start disappearing. Something seems to be hunting them down - and Jenna, who earned her place in the afterlife by running away, might not be able to outrun this danger.

REVIEW: Though it feels tangentially connected to other works by McGuire (such as her Ghost Roads trilogy), this novella works well enough as a standalone, creating a mythos of ghosts and witches, where the afterlife is part of a greater ecosystem of time whose collapse would have terrible consequences in the mortal world and beyond. Jenna herself barely understands it, for all that she's been a ghost for forty-odd years; this is not a world of rigidly defined rules and magical systems, but something far more complicated and esoteric and beyond the grasp of humans, where even experts like witches are often groping in the dark about their own powers and limitations. What rules there are, though, provide some framework for what the characters can or cannot do in any given situation, enough to keep the plot from being utterly random (and enough to demonstrate the stakes). Jenna often feels lost and over her head trying to parse it all, especially when the danger strikes very close to home, but she's not the same scared runaway girl she was when she died. The story takes a while to get itself off the runway, and when it gets to the final act some elements and at least one character motivation felt a bit underdeveloped. Despite that, it has the sort of atmospheric writing I've come to expect from McGuire, and evokes some real emotions.

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