Mortal Vengeance II: To Reel Or Not Too Real? by Alejandro Torres De la Rocha picks up with a friend group that, in the previous installment, poisoned an abusive teacher.
This event didn't escape the eyes of Shane Harper, an American producer who delights in seeing her characters break on camera, one of them being Alex, the alpha of the group. In fact, Shane likes that Alex is an orchestrator of chaos like herself, a role she embraces very well by reminding people of the things they should feel most shameful about. Beyond that, she sees everyone as a line item in a budget. She respects leverage, not morality, and sees vulnerability as opportunity. When individuals like Valeria and Camila lay down their "high" cost for joining her show, she's unmoved. Valeria needs Shane to settle her mom’s mortgage, while Camila wants college fees. To them they are negotiating, but to Shane, it's a trap they've walked into willingly. Unbeknownst to them, she's already snapped it shut.
Shane's show, The Real Scholars of Excelsior Academy, is a hit, thanks to her cruelty and a system that rewards exploitation of trauma. Among her characters is Melissa, a young woman who killed the original killers in the previous installment. She's been traumatized ever since. But rather than show restraint, Shane takes it a notch higher, interviewing Melissa after drugging her, and later, exposing her secrets on national television without her consent. In so doing, we see Melissa's trauma turned into performance, a performance that we understand is actually a template for something worse.
While the Grim Cojuelo isn't a new invention, especially to the reader who's read the previous installment, its horror in this book is no longer just the scythe, but the same performance repeated. We know the killer is acting for the cameras, and that his mask goes beyond a disguise. By the time he removes it, the role has already consumed him. That's what makes this reenactment horrifying, that someone can become the character they perform, especially after the line between acting and reality dissolves completely.
This book swings violently between horror, satire, and romance, mimicking the reality TV experience where viewers often go from a tearful confrontation to a slapstick fight, and then to a heartfelt confession in the span of a single commercial break. You never know what emotional register the next page is going to hit, which is a kind of unpredictability that keeps you off-balance exactly like the show's audience, never allowed to settle into just one feeling. And that's the point, thanks to the reader watching the produced version of events. Alejandro Torres De la Rocha uses chyrons, captions and on-screen text that frame the action like a TV broadcast. These are deliberate choices that ensure the reader never forgets they are reading and watching a constructed version of reality. As a result, they don't need to be told how it feels to be inside a reality TV show; they are immersed, and that immersion develops a visceral understanding reality TV’s manipulation.
Quill says: The subtitle of this book "To Reel Or Not Too Real?" lives up to its promise of capturing the tension between performance and authenticity. The reader is left holding the contradiction between the horror it constructs and the genuineness of the trauma it exploits. That's something you want from a book that is beautifully lengthy and dense, and one whose betrayal is unexpected, an own weapon turned back on its owner, cutting deepest because it knows the way in. This book deserves your space and time, especially if you are a fan of thrillers that reject the cheap thrill of a jump scare, the easy resolution of a mystery, and the comfort of knowing the monsters are always someone else.
For more information about Mortal Vengeance II: To Reel Or Not Too Real?, please visit the author's website at: mortalvengeance.com/
