By: Cooper Hofmann

Everyone dreads the sequel. You love this property, cherish this blessed piece of media that managed to fulfill its purpose and entertain you. It’s everything you love and all you want is more. It’s your golden child in a sea full of participation trophies. Then the sequel staggers in, well beyond curfew, and tells you it just vomited on your porch. 

Book sequels get the worst end of the stick. Where a movie can at worst awkwardly cut to a scene from the prior film, books can’t rely on showing rather than telling. If it needs to remind you, it will very abruptly cut all semblance of cohesive storytelling to have a side character go into painful detail, saying something that makes you sigh, as they proclaim the protagonist’s entire emotional arc, whatever flaws they have, and half the plot of the past novel. 

You can laugh when a Marvel film explains the infinity stones for the umpteenth time, because we all stopped expecting subtlety from the Duffer brothers a long, long time ago. But books are smart, or at least they try to be, so you expect their explanations to be equally smart. 

But, Nicholas Eames made me believe in sequels again. His first novel, “Kings of the Wyld,” was a fantastic fantasy novel about old heroes and grand adventures. Its worldbuilding was intelligent. It was so perfect in how quickly it moved you towards the rest of the story. No time was wasted on long-winded explanations of how the HeartWyld learned to celebrate Christmas, or why the people paid for stuff in gold and silver. It was enthralling, hilarious, thoughtful, and so inspired. I liked that book a lot, so I was naturally wary of the sequel. I sat awake at night wondering how Eames could desecrate the twitching corpse of his first book.

But “Bloody Rose” pleasantly surprised me. The mentions of the prior novel are so featherlight that when you read them, you’re hit with this subtle feeling of, ‘oh yeah, that did happen. Fun.’ Eames trusts you to remember what happened in “Kings of the Wyld.” He trusts you to just get it, and the sequel is made better for it. It doesn’t waste time as the story moves in this wonderful breakneck pace that leaves you constantly wanting more, while allowing enough space to see the characters grow in a natural way. Eames has a unique touch to all of his work, but “Bloody Rose” is a truly fantastic piece of literature. It has its faults, obviously. The ending moves far too fast for one to respect the major events that happen during it, and I have my gripes with certain character decisions made. But, when all is said and done, Eames made a good sequel. One that pays respects to the original, while also offshooting into a story that’s truly its own work. “Bloody Rose” is as impressive as it is entertaining, and it makes for an amazing read.