Inner Monologue

There have been endless think pieces in the last few years about reboot and nostalgia culture and how it’s ruining a lot of current media. I agree with a lot of it and smarter critics than me have already said it better. But I want to specifically talk about sequels, and why I would really push artists to really think about what they lose when they go back to the well.

One of the books I read this year was “We Love You, Bunny”, which is the sequel to Mona Awad’s 2019 critically acclaimed novel. I really enjoy Awad’s novels (for the record, my favorite is “Rouge”, which I consider essential reading) and her darkly funny voice. She blends cultural criticism with horror and fantastical elements through a truly singular perspective; you know when you’re reading one of her books. So I was really excited when I heard that she would be releasing a sequel to “Bunny” and immediately got on the waitlist at the library. Reader, was I disappointed. I just did not find it as sharp or tight or compelling as the first book, and I had a lot of issues with it, which really reflect my general issues with sequels. In no particular order:

1. “We Love You Bunny” actually takes place in mostly the same timeframe as “Bunny” but events that occur in the second book don’t seem to match up with the events from the first book. If you’re going to do this, you or and editor needs to make sure that those all match, or it really blows holes in the logic of the book (and makes me question why you’ve done this if you can’t even do the quality control of a side-by-side timeline)
2. The second book focuses mostly on the male characters, which I’m sorry, just is not as compelling as the female-specific themes of the first book. What made “Bunny” so amazing and subversive was that it discussed the realties of female expectations, connections, relationships, and belonging in the framework of a horror story. Which is what girlhood often is and no one wants to say it! It was a book for the weird girl in all of us, which isn’t always a voice you get to hear. So to see that the sequel focused more on the male characters was honestly a bit of a let down. They have enough pages of literature focused on them.
3. Part of the brilliance of “Bunny” was that you had no idea what was going on in the minds of the villains, the Bunnies. You could only guess through the warped and unreliable perspective of the main character what they were thinking, what their motivations and goals were, etc. How they came to be friends, their backstory as a collective. The ambiguity worked for the novel and part of why it was so great was that it didn’t feel the need to explain it all to you as the reader. It trusted you. But in “We Love You Bunny”, the characters take turns exploring their memories and inner thoughts, which honestly was a but of a let down. Sometimes villains are more fun when you don’t know what going on behind the curtain.

All this to say, if you’re going to do a sequel to a best-selling novel, you really need to ask yourself why you’re doing it. Is it because you want to expand on the world and the characters you built? Put them into new scenarios or show how they have changed in the intervening years? Or is this simply a cynical cash grab because your publisher knows people will buy it? Maybe it’s because I am not a professional artist who does this for a living, but wouldn’t the integrity of the work more important than a paycheck? Are you going to ruin the legacy of a great work with a shadow of itself that’s forever attached? I would argue no, resist the urge to that it’s not worth it, have your book be a fantastic stand-alone piece of work. When we think of the “great novels of the modern era”, how many of them have sequels? Right, like none. Not everything that is good needs to be revisited. In the end, maybe don’t kill your darlings.