We live in an age of wonders.

Modern medicine has conquered or contained many of the diseases that used to carry children away before their time, reducing mortality and improving health. Vaccination and treatment are widely available, not held in reserve for the chosen few. There are still monsters left to fight, but the old ones, the simple ones, trouble us no more.

Or so we thought. For with the reduction in danger comes the erosion of memory, as pandemics fade from memory into story into fairy tale. Those old diseases can’t have been so bad, people say, or we wouldn’t be here to talk about them. They don’t matter. They’re never coming back.

How wrong we could be.

It begins with a fever. By the time the spots appear, it’s too late: Morris’s disease is loose on the world, and the bodies of the dead begin to pile high in the streets. When its terrible side consequences for the survivors become clear, something must be done, or the dying will never stop. For Dr. Isabella Gauley, whose niece was the first confirmed victim, the route forward is neither clear nor strictly ethical, but it may be the only way to save a world already in crisis. It may be the only way to atone for her part in everything that’s happened.

She will never be forgiven, not by herself, and not by anyone else. But she can, perhaps, do the right thing.

We live in an age of monsters.

Seanan McGuire (aka Mira Grant) tweeted something out the other day, and it seems incredibly relevant to this review. I believe it was the day before In an Absent Dream was released, and she was doing a sort of FAQ about the series.

Here’s the tweet:

It’s impossible for me to not think of Kingdom of Needle and Bone as a prequel, especially in light of that tweet. I missed out on the Subterranean Press release for Rolling in the Deep (I may have to just give up on my crazy dream of ever finding an affordable copy of the hardcover & just read it digitally), but Into the Drowning Deep was one of my favorite books of 2018, easy. And yeah…the way that Kingdom of Needle and Bone reads & ends…I gotta think (and hope) that this isn’t the last we see of this world, and of these characters.

This is a medical/epidemic thriller, and it’s beautifully written. Chilling & heartbreaking in equal measures, it also resonates very loudly in the age of the anti-vaxxer movement.

This novella packs a serious emotional punch, especially in the early going. Honestly, my heart was breaking almost right away. Things begin with Lisa Morris, age eight, becoming Patient Zero. She’s vacationing in Orlando with her family, trying to downplay her symptoms so she can continue having fun at the amusement parks (*sniff*) But Lisa is very, very sick. She basically comes down with a type of measles, later dubbed Morris’s disease. Although Lisa was up to date on all her vaccines, this…this is something new, and Lisa is the first victim it claims.

From there, things get much, much worse. All kinds of diseases that we don’t think too much about these days come roaring back…measles, mumps, whooping cough. Populations are decimated. It’s all incredibly grim & scary & feels horrifyingly real.

The main character is Dr. Isabella Gauley, better known as Izzy. She’s a pediatrician, and she’s also Lisa Morris’s aunt, making her connection to this outbreak deeply personal. She becomes a crusader of sorts, setting out to protect what’s left of the human population, the people who seem to have a natural immunity to Morris’s disease.

For such a short book (125 pages), there are some major twists & turns. Which of course makes it difficult to review. Kingdom of Needle and Bone is meticulously written, it’s creepy in its believability, and it’s unapologetically pro-vaccine (yes, please). I’m at a point where I want to read literally everything that Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant writes, and this was every bit as good as I had hoped it would be. It makes me VERY eager to get started on the Newsflesh books & the Parasitology trilogy. But fair warning…this really feels like the start of something. And fuck, I hope it is. There’s nothing remotely neat about the way this one turns out, so all I can do is just cross my fingers we get more. Because like she said in that tweet, she’s always plotting.