Mr. Monster by Dan Wells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This series is YA Dexter. Which is fine. No problem. I hope Dexter becomes a whole sub-genre.
But this is a sequel, and that presents some problems. Wells does a pretty good job dealing with them. The twist at the end of the first book, for instance, can’t work twice. So he puts in a red herring that can only work after that twist.
It’s a clever technique. You can’t do the same twist twice, because you put some assumptions in your reader’s heads the first time. But you can turn that into an advantage! What technique depends on assumptions in your reader’s heads? The red herring.
It’s a good red herring.
The other sequel problem is getting new or distant readers up to speed. I think Wells could spend a little less time explaining what happened in the first book.
My own current feeling on this subject (which may change) is that if you put “Book Two” on the cover, you don’t have to explain. If somebody needs to know what happened in the first book, they should read the first book. Like, if the novel isn’t a stand-alone, it doesn’t have to stand alone.
It probably depends on your genre, too. YA novels might need to stand alone a bit better than, say, epic fantasy.