“Sequels are hard,” Scarlett Dunmore notes in the acknowledgments of How To Survive A Horror Sequel (Little Tiger, £8.99), a tongue-in-cheek romp through slasher film tropes. She points to the need to preserve “the original narrative tone” while also “searching for a new creative direction”, a reminder that second instalments present specific challenges.
For Dunmore, the success of her sequel depends on an entirely new setting – having left behind the gothic boarding school on a rugged island, where half the graduating class were horribly murdered, Charley has relocated to a small, spooky Scottish village. Here she meets Flora, a cute waitress with whom sparks fly, as well as a strangely charismatic family who may have something to do with the number of outsiders who come to unhappy ends around these parts.
As with the first title, it’s Charley’s inner monologue that infuses the sometimes-slapstick story with charm: in a fit of adolescent angst, she wonders “why couldn’t I have had a better ability, like healing, invisibility, or superstrength like a Marvel character? Why did I have to have a superpower that involves talking with dead folk?”
Charley’s awareness of horror devices adds humour but also raises the stakes: how do you tell a convincingly creepy story when the protagonist is so genre-savvy that a villain can accurately label her as “a Final Girl who’s begging to be killed off”? At times the pop-culture references feel they might overwhelm, but at others they serve as a way of speeding up the plot, culminating in one deliciously unhinged Halloween night. Brilliant fun.
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The popularity of fantasy trilogies – for which we’re still blaming, or crediting, Tolkien – means that a second book often has to serve as both sequel and a bridge to the final volume, and runs the risk of feeling like filler. In Brían Dungan’s Wintour’s Fate (Little Tiger, £8.99), after a shocking revelation at the end of the first volume, we find ourselves tugged into a new mystery. The daring and sparky Alex wakes up after an explosion to a familiar face at her bedside – a woman named Christine, who may or may not be her long-lost mother. Just as memories begin to swim to the surface, Christine disappears, and Alex sets off to find her – all the while hunted by people who fear Alex’s time-controlling powers.
This action-packed tale does a particularly good job at using typography to indicate the strange, fragmented nature of Alex’s gifts – the flashes of memory or the “whiiipcrack!” of toying with “Temporal energy”. It infuses the prose with a little bit of comic book energy and works fabulously on the page. Slightly less successful is the international cast of villains, whose accents often veer towards cliche, but the quick pace encourages one not to linger too long on such things. This is a solid follow-up.
Moira Buffini’s Torchlight (Faber, £8.99) is also a middle volume, expanding on her futuristic world of telepathy and control. The complex politics between Ayland and Brightland, with their differing attitudes towards how to treat those with psychic “songlight”, continue to simmer, while another group is thrown into the mix. Above the Earth, the airship Celestis contains “eximians”, returning to the planet of their ancestors to inspect the damage done during the “suicidal frenzy of destruction” that the “sapiens” carried out. A journal kept by one of the passengers deftly balances personal heartbreak with the sadness over the “Great Extinction”, allowing for the environmental message to come through without feeling didactic.
Introducing the “eximians” immediately widens the scope of this already well-populated world, and while it’s an effective way of distinguishing this book from the first instalment, it also means there are many new characters to account for. It can get confusing at times – not least because this is a world where characters with songlight go by multiple names. (The front matter includes a map but not a cast list, which feels remiss given Buffini’s background as a playwright and screenwriter.) Sometimes characters vanish from the polyvocal narration for longer than one might like. I found myself wanting more of the morally ambiguous types, such as Piper, whose role as a loyal airman has led him to betray people he loves, or the propagandist Swan, who proudly insists that her hate is “the only thing that’s never let me down. What is left of me without my hate?”
But these are minor quibbles; this is a deeply satisfying chunky read (the print edition comes in at more than 500 pages) that poses vital questions about war, courage and identity. Dystopias lend themselves beautifully to YA because they offer a more dramatic canvas for that essential coming-of-age question: what kind of person do I want to be? The big choices the characters make in this trilogy make for a compelling, thought-provoking story.
We’ve another second instalment with Catherine Doyle’s The Rebel and the Rose (Simon & Schuster, £16.99) and, like Buffini, Doyle expands her fantasy canvas considerably. Book one focused on rival gangs and magical substances in the city of Fantome; book two explores the wider country of Valterre and its tradition of saints. We meet the king, who declares, ominously: “Rebellion has its teeth in my kingdom. Rumours of Oriel’s final prophecy occupy my advisers’ every thought. They speak now of nothing else. They believe these new saints will spell the end of our age. Of kings and Shade, and man-appointed power. As they crop up like weeds, we must stamp them out ...”
Alongside the politics, there is – of course – the sizzling romance between Sera and Ransom, thrown together once more into a series of tense and sexy situations. This is where purple prose sometimes creeps in – “Those honeyed eyes that had once looked upon her with such naked desire now burned with firelight and rage,” Sera reflects – but it’s also why we’re reading, really.
And now on to the concluding volumes of trilogies. The virtual-reality world of Triona Campbell’s Enter the Endgame (Scholastic, £8.99) continues to feel alarmingly relevant, with greedy billionaires eager to use technology “to remake the world to suit themselves” while they remain “immune to the consequences of what they did. Answerable to no one.” The stakes are higher than they’ve ever been for gamer Asha and her friends, having been continuously escalating since book one: in this near-future setting, a malign piece of code lurks in a locked drive, ready to allow the sinister Lydia Rock to control anyone who uses “brain-computer interfaces” – most of the population.
But Asha’s not just trying to save the world – there’s a more personal, immediate threat that correlates with the global danger, and it’s what readers will be most invested in. A gorgeously twisty finale.
Vanessa Len also successfully closes a trilogy with Once A Villain (Hodderscape, £20), in which magical time-travellers Joan, Nick and Aaron have landed in a dark timeline from where there seems to be no escape. “This world was a worm-eaten apple,” Joan notes, haunted by “the terrifying nothingness” that threatens the very fabric of existence. (Book three: the stakes are incredibly high!)
Len combines exquisite worldbuilding with thoughtful characterisation, and provides an extremely pleasing resolution to her love triangle (along with saving the universe). A thoroughly addictive read.
