Discount Armageddon

 

By Seanan McGuire

Cryptid:  an animal (such as Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster) that has been claimed to exist but never proven to exist. 

Cryptozoologist: a person who studies cryptids.

Like Verity Price. Who lives in New York City and works as a waitress but whose true profession is studying and discovering and helping all the cryptids (and there are a lot) who make the city their home. Indeed, most of the girls who work are her job at Dave's Fish and Strips are cryptids. There's Carol, the gorgon. Candy the dragon princess. Marcy the oread, some kind of mineral-based stony girl. And Istas the waheela, a sort of werebear. All of these girls disguise themselves to pass as human. And some, like Istas, are shapeshifters. 

Cryptozoology is Verity's family's vocation, one she was raised to become from childhood. But she would much rather be a professional ballroom dancer and she dances under the name of Valerie Pryor and she moved to New York to be closer to the ballroom dancing scene. But she still works in the family business as a cryptozoologist, tracking and studying all the cryptids in the city. 

Her family has a long history as cryptozoologists, going back generations. At one point they were part of an organization, the Covenant, whose main goal is locating and exterminating cryptids they view as dangerous. Like dragons, which they managed to wipe out. But Verity's ancestors realized that many cryptids are intelligent beings that, if left alone, are harmless. And so they left the Covenant, which put them on the Covenant's hit list as traitors to the grand cause. 

Between waitressing, dancing and training to keep her fighting skills topnotch, Verity has come to realize that someone is causing many cryptid people to disappear. She soon stumbles upon who she thinks is the cause, a Covenant agent newly arrived in New York, Dominic De Luca. But as he explains, he has only killed a few non-sapient cryptid animals. Further inquires reveal that the cryptids who have gone missing are all young, female virgin-type creatures. And further investigation seems to point to a snake cult sacrificing these girls to a dragon who is living under New York City. 

So Verity has her work cut out for her: she has to protect and warn the local cryptid girls, stop the snake cult from killing people, locate the dragon without turning it lose on the city, as in Godzilla time, and keep the Covenant agent from killing all her cryptid friends and coworkers and from killing the last surviving dragon left in the world. 

This was a fun read, exciting and a bit silly with lots of whacky characters, the whackiest being Verity herself. She hurls herself into danger like a daredevil and shares her apartment with a tribe of sentient mice who have formed a religion around the mundane aspects of her life.  And she works with a group of cryptids who know about her family's past association with the Covenant, which causes them to view her as a possible danger to their very lives, which makes for some tension at her job. 

Oh, and of course, she falls for the Covenant agent and they end up in bed together. Naturally.

Here is a review of the novel by Publishers Weekly.