Feathered Quill Book Reviews

 #Authorinterview with Alejandro Torres De la Rocha

Today, Feathered Quill reviewer Ephantus Muriuki is talking with Alejandro Torres De la Rocha, author of Mortal Vengeance II: To Reel Or Not Too Real?.

FQ: Was there a specific real-world show or media trend that sparked the initial idea for this book, or was it simply an original idea?

TORRES DE LA ROCHA: No single television show inspired the idea, although my love for Bravo and the Real Housewives franchises is very real! Hi, Andy! Love what you're doing, keep it up! But seriously, why no Dallas on RHUGT: Roaring 20th? Huh?

Anyway, the origins of Mortal Vengeance II: To Reel or Not Too Real? go all the way back to 1999, when I was fifteen years old.

I originally wrote Mortal Vengeance as a script while attending an all-boys Jesuit school in Santo Domingo. My motivation? Using fiction to punish my Spanish teacher for giving me my first D. Yes, I was apparently already a very well-adjusted teenager.

I revisited that manuscript in 2025, transforming it into the novel readers know today. The original version had more characters, and Mónika had a very different ending. Back in 1999, there were plenty of things I didn't understand, especially how to write female characters or integrate them organically into the story.

When I finished the new draft, I realized how much I'd grown to root for Mónika as the story progressed. She had the potential to become a fan favorite, and I knew I was going to hate myself, and probably get plenty of hate from readers, if I killed her off. So I decided to keep her alive. And since I'd already joked about Mónika wanting her own reality television show, I thought, Well, why not give her one?

Initially, the reality show could have been nothing more than a footnote between Books 1 and 2, something the characters might mention in passing. But instead of jumping straight into the sequel, I wrote Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Tale, a prequel that didn't exist in my original 1999 trilogy.

Unlike Mortal Vengeance, A Grim Tale isn't a slasher. It's an intense psychological thriller that follows Julián Díaz, a character who was essentially a footnote in Book 1's B-Roll section, where his experiences show readers just how terrible Profesora Lourdes really is, rather than having other characters tell them. In A Grim Tale, we follow Julián's psychological deterioration throughout the school year. In my completely unbiased opinion, it's a great book: tense, dark, and emotionally demanding. But maintaining that level of psychological tension throughout the writing process can put an author in a pretty heavy headspace. At least, it did for me.

Knowing that I still had this reality television premise waiting for me in the sequel, I decided to have a little fun with the characters in A Grim Tale. There's a moment when Julián's mental state has deteriorated so badly that he begins hallucinating the events leading up to the school debate and soccer tournament as the cold open and opening credits of a reality television show. Even Julián recognizes that something is seriously wrong with him.

It's an absurd moment in an otherwise very dark story, but it gave me the creative breathing room I needed. More importantly, it convinced me that the reality television premise could work.

And when you look back at the previous books, the groundwork was already there. Pop culture has always been part of the characters' world, whether they're discussing comic books, celebrity culture, or Teresa Giudice flipping tables on The Real Housewives of New Jersey. But perhaps more importantly, social media and the power of recorded footage were already integral to the storytelling.

We see Melissa putting Elías on blast during a livestream with Mónika and María, an event presented from two different perspectives across Mortal Vengeance and A Grim Tale. There's even the hashtag: #TheyDontGetToseeUBleedTheyGet2SeeYouLeave. The Grim Cojuelo also weaponizes footage against Melissa and sends recordings to the students while they're at school. And, most significantly, the killer livestreams the final showdown.

So the idea of turning tragedy into something people could watch, share, and consume wasn't new to the series. The characters were already living in a world where private suffering could become public entertainment, and where controlling what people saw could be just as powerful as controlling what actually happened. The reality show took those ideas to their logical, and considerably more outrageous, conclusion.

And then there's the Dominican Republic itself. If you really think about it, had something like the events of Mortal Vengeance happened in real life, I wouldn't be surprised if the public's morbid curiosity eventually transformed the survivors into celebrities, with someone offering them their own reality show.

There's something deeply unsettling about how easily tragedy can become entertainment, especially when people are willing to watch, participate, and profit from it.

So while my love for reality television certainly influenced how I approached the sequel, the premise wasn't inspired by one particular show. It evolved organically from the characters, from the creative process of writing the prequel, and from observing our fascination with other people's lives and suffering.

And as for whether something like that could really happen in the Dominican Republic? Well, for all intents and purposes, let's hope we never have to find out.

FQ: I am privileged to have read both Books 1 and 2. How did your approach to writing this story change from the first book now that you were navigating the world of reality television and media exploitation, rather than just the initial school massacre?

TORRES DE LA ROCHA: Once I committed to having the characters participate in a reality television show, I knew there were certain rules I had to follow. First and foremost, the reality show could not be a gimmick. It had to be an integral part of the story, not just an excuse to put the survivors in front of cameras before another masked killer showed up.

I didn't want to simply tell readers that the characters were filming a reality show, occasionally show them on set, or have them discuss their latest episode or promotional appearances. I wanted readers to experience the actual finished product that the fictional audience was watching. It had to be immediately recognizable as a reality television episode, complete with confessionals, editing, captions, dramatic confrontations, and all the ridiculous conventions that make the genre so entertaining. Ideally, I wanted readers to think, You know what? I'd actually watch this show.

But it also had to be consequential. If you removed The Real Scholars of Excelsior Academy from the novel, the entire story should fall apart because you've removed essential narrative pillars. That's where the show became something of a Trojan horse. Readers might think they're watching the cast bicker, flirt, gossip, or manufacture drama, but those apparently frivolous moments are also developing characters, establishing relationships, revealing motivations, planting evidence, and setting up events that will become significant much later.

Another important rule was that the show had to remain a reality show, even as the horror escalated. I couldn't suddenly abandon its identity and turn every episode into a succession of murders, ominous shadows, and frightening encounters. The ordinary absurdities of reality television still needed to exist alongside the increasingly extraordinary circumstances. The WatchMojo countdown, for example, demonstrates how that entertainment format can remain relevant to the narrative while also serving a much larger purpose, including setting up plot points for Book 3.

From a technical standpoint, I also approached the narration differently. During televised sequences, I deliberately withheld access to the characters' internal thoughts and reflections. Readers are watching the edited version of events, just as the fictional audience is. They can observe someone's behavior, listen to a confession, or witness an argument, but they don't necessarily know what that person is thinking, concealing, or intending. That's where the distinction between performance and persona, between what's reel and what's real, matters most.

It also allowed me to develop the camera as both a weapon and a witness. Footage can expose the truth, but it can also be edited, manipulated, weaponized, or stripped of its original context. And because the reader is consuming that footage, they're participating in the same process as the show's audience, whether they realize it or not.

But perhaps the most important evolution was how I approached exploitation itself.

In Mortal Vengeance and A Grim Tale, institutional exploitation is built around silence. Excelsior Academy and its authorities want to suppress the truth, protect their reputations, and keep the students and survivors voiceless. The institution demands their silence, and that silence becomes another form of complicity.

In Mortal Vengeance II, the media appears to offer the exact opposite. Shane Harper wants these people to speak! She wants them to expose their secrets, confront their trauma, discuss their relationships, and reveal everything they've spent years trying to hide. She gives them a brightly illuminated stage, cameras, microphones, and an audience eager to hear their stories.

And isn't that wonderful? After everything they've endured, someone finally wants to give them a voice!

Except, of course, there's a catch.

The institution wanted to control their stories by preventing them from being told. The media wants to control those same stories by deciding how they're told, what gets included, what gets edited out, and how the audience is supposed to interpret them.

One demands silence in the name of protecting the institution. The other demands disclosure in the name of sharing their stories. But neither is particularly interested in allowing these people to own their narratives.

Both believe they have a claim over the survivors' voices, identities, and experiences. One wants to bury their trauma; the other wants to monetize it.

And that's what makes the transition from Mortal Vengeance to Mortal Vengeance II so interesting to me. The characters may have escaped Excelsior Academy, but they haven't necessarily escaped the systems that exploited them. They've simply moved from an institution that wanted nobody to hear them to an entertainment industry that wants everybody watching.

The question is no longer just whether they'll finally be allowed to speak. It's whether anything they say will still belong to them once the cameras stop rolling.

FQ: The "Credit Index" at the back, detailing the reality TV quotes used for chapter titles, is a fascinating addition. Is it a way to honor the source material?

TORRES DE LA ROCHA: Absolutely! The Credit Index is my way of thanking, honoring, crediting, respecting, highlighting, and celebrating reality television celebrities. Or rather, the people behind those television personalities, who have done something I think is wonderfully brave: stepped in front of a recording camera and dared to be wholeheartedly themselves.

In doing so, they've exposed themselves and their families, willingly or not, to hatred, ridicule, mockery, and bullying. They've allowed millions of strangers to form opinions about who they are, how they behave, and what kind of people they must be, often based on a heavily edited version of their lives.

And I think we should be careful about judging them. Let's not pretend we know these people or understand their reasons for participating. We don't. Let's not reduce everything to money and confidently declare that we'd do the same thing for a paycheck. God knows most of us are already willing to embarrass ourselves on social media for likes and giggles! But that's nowhere near the same level of exposure, and certainly not the same vulnerability that comes with putting yourself, your relationships, and your family in front of millions of viewers.

That takes a pair. Cojones or ovaries, take your pick. They're both eggs!

But there's also a much more personal reason behind the Credit Index.

That angry fifteen-year-old who wrote the original Mortal Vengeance trilogy was also a frightened, closeted sixteen-year-old boy attending an all-boys Catholic school and growing up in a conservative family in the Caribbean.

And one day, that boy turned on MTV and watched The Real World: New Orleans.

There was Danny Roberts, living his life in front of the cameras, and I heard him say something in French that I couldn't yet bring myself to say in any language:

Je suis pédé.

Moi aussi, Danny. Moi aussi.

His boyfriend's face might have been blurred, but there was Danny, showing the world who he was, even when the world wasn't necessarily ready to accept him.

And somewhere in Santo Domingo, a frightened teenager was watching, realizing that someone out there was like him. Someone who was brave enough to say it out loud. Someone who made him believe that perhaps, one day, he could find the courage to do the same.

To show himself.

That's something I have never forgotten.

So yes, the Credit Index is absolutely a tribute to the people whose words, personalities, arguments, friendships, and unforgettable television moments have entertained us over the years. But it's also an acknowledgment that their willingness to be seen can have consequences far beyond entertainment. Sometimes, without ever knowing it, they give someone watching at home the courage to imagine a different life for themselves.

And I think that deserves a little recognition, don't you?

Oh, and hopefully the Credit Index also helps keep me from getting sued by anyone.

That would be nice, too.

FQ: What was the process of compiling the Dominicanismos glossary? Was it difficult? Did it teach you anything new about your own native slang?

TORRES DE LA ROCHA: My Mexican brother-in-law once told my sister, "It's such a pity to have resources and just let them go to waste."

Why am I quoting him? Well, bear with me.

When it came to incorporating Dominicanismos organically into the story, that was the easiest part. I just had to write them. I might live in Barcelona now, but I was born and raised in the Dominican Republic, and I still visit quite frequently. The expressions, slang, and peculiarities of Dominican Spanish naturally made their way into the dialogue because that's how we speak. I wasn't sitting there thinking, Hmm, how can I make this character sound more Dominican? They already were Dominican.

Now, there's something that drives me absolutely crazy when I'm reading a book written in one established language and suddenly another language or an unfamiliar expression appears. Either a conveniently positioned character turns into a talking parrot, immediately translating everything into the established language, or we're treated to a parenthetical explanation that practically interrupts the conversation to deliver a linguistic dissertation.

Don't get me wrong, the occasional parrot character can be useful. But please, not every single time someone opens their mouth!

And here's the thing about Dominicanismos: they don't necessarily need explaining only to English-speaking readers. Someone from Spain, Mexico, Argentina, or practically any other Spanish-speaking country might have absolutely no idea what a particular Dominican expression means. We share a language, but we certainly don't always speak it the same way.

I wanted to remain faithful to my characters, my culture, and the setting without constantly interrupting the narrative to explain what everyone was saying, while still making the story accessible to readers regardless of their familiarity with Dominican Spanish. A glossary seemed like the most practical solution. Readers who understand the expressions can keep reading, while those who don't can look them up without having the dialogue explained to them every five minutes.

To be clear: the story, the characters, and the Dominicanismos were already there. But once the manuscript was finished, I had a rather tedious task ahead of me: identifying all those expressions, figuring out where they first appeared, recording the corresponding chapters, and making sure I wasn't including duplicates.

And this is where my brother-in-law's observation comes in.

I asked ChatGPT to read the entire manuscript, identify the Dominicanismos where they first appeared, record their respective chapters, eliminate duplicates, and organize everything into a table in a downloadable document.

I didn't need artificial intelligence to teach me how Dominicans speak or to invent dialogue for my characters. I needed help organizing something I'd already written. There is a considerable difference between creating a story and using a tool to help catalog its contents.

And yes, I checked its work.

Was it difficult? Writing the Dominicanismos wasn't. The tedious part would have been manually combing through the entire manuscript, keeping track of every expression and its first appearance. That's precisely the kind of work where using an available resource makes perfect sense.

As for whether it taught me anything new about my own slang, the process made me more conscious of just how much of our cultural identity is embedded in expressions we use without giving them a second thought. What sounds completely ordinary to someone from Santo Domingo might be utterly baffling to someone from Madrid, even though we're supposedly speaking the same language.

And I rather love that.

The glossary wasn't an attempt to translate the Dominican identity out of the novel to make it more accessible. Quite the opposite. It was a way of preserving that identity while inviting readers from elsewhere to understand it. Because if I'm writing a story set in the Dominican Republic, populated by Dominican characters, why on earth would I have them speak as though they're auditioning for a neutral-Spanish dubbing job?

And could one or two expressions have slipped through the cracks? Of course. We're talking about a manuscript that took nine months to reach a final draft, followed by another five months of editing, reviewing, rewriting, and rechecking. I wouldn't pretend that a glossary could capture every linguistic nuance of Dominican Spanish, nor was that ever its purpose. What matters is that readers can understand the characters without sacrificing the authenticity of how they speak.

Besides, as my brother-in-law would say, it would be such a pity to have all these resources and just let them go to waste!

FQ: What kind of research went into capturing the reality show world so authentically?

TORRES DE LA ROCHA: I'd really love to sell myself here as some sort of Elle Woods, suddenly getting serious, hitting the books, taking meticulous notes, and putting together an impressive research montage. But that wasn't exactly the case.

The truth is, I enjoy reality television, and I've been watching it for decades. And I haven't just watched the shows. Over the years, I've also read books like The Andy Cohen Diaries: A Deep Look at a Shallow Year. Then, earlier this year, Netflix released this tiny, obscure docuseries that practically nobody watched, Reality Check: Inside America's Next Top Model.

But here's the thing: none of this fell into my lap because I was researching Mortal Vengeance II. I've always been interested in getting the full story, or at least as much of it as possible.

When you've followed these shows for years, you naturally start following the people involved beyond their television appearances. You check out their social media accounts, listen to their podcasts (hi, Bethenny!), watch their interviews, and inevitably find yourself down a YouTube rabbit hole of former cast members, producers, and other people revealing what supposedly really happened behind the scenes.

And that's where things get interesting.

Of course, you have to remember that everyone is telling their own version of events. Just because someone goes on a podcast and reveals what they claim is the truth doesn't mean you're suddenly getting the full picture. Their version might be just as selective as the edited television episode they're criticizing. So you listen, compare, question, and occasionally find those little hidden gems that reveal something about how the whole machinery works.

And I find that fascinating! Not just the arguments, the table-flipping, or the outrageous confessionals, but how these shows are constructed, how people become characters, how reputations are shaped, and how the same incident can become two completely different stories depending on who's telling it.

So when I started writing Mortal Vengeance II, I wasn't approaching reality television as an unfamiliar world I needed to research from scratch. It was a world I'd been following, enjoying, and questioning for years. The challenge was taking that familiarity and translating it into a fictional reality show that felt authentic, entertaining, and believable, while making it an essential part of a psychological horror story.

I suppose you could say I've been doing research for this book for most of my life. I just didn't realize I was doing it. And I certainly wasn't getting paid for it!

Beyond that, of course, Mortal Vengeance II is a work of fiction, and any resemblance between its fictional characters or events and actual people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

So I'm just going to pretend I'm a guest on Watch What Happens Live and plead the fifth!

FQ: The characters, Alex and Melissa, have now evolved over two books. Did that surprise you while writing this sequel?

TORRES DE LA ROCHA: Characters can take you in unexpected directions during the writing process, but their evolution, Alex's in particular, was something I deliberately wanted to honor rather than undo.

In the original Mortal Vengeance, Alex and his actions are purposefully ambiguous. I wanted readers to question how truthful he was, how manipulative he was, and whether they could tell the difference. I've read comments suggesting he wasn't really in love with Melissa, that he only wanted her because Enrique did. I enjoyed discovering that interpretation. His love for her is real, but the fact that readers questioned it told me the ambiguity was working.

His growth also begins in that first book. After reconciling with Mario while in jail, Alex starts making small but meaningful efforts to be more present and accountable. He asks Mario about his father and whether he's coming to visit, showing that he's listened to his friend. Later, following the Grim Cojuelo's unmasking, Alex acknowledges his responsibility for the events that unfolded. He didn't wield the scythe, but he recognizes how his actions and cowardice contributed to the tragedy. That's considerable growth to carry into a sequel.

The first book also reveals that Alex has borderline personality disorder. Now imagine experiencing everything he did and having to live with the consequences. Does he use his diagnosis as an excuse, a crutch, something to blame? Or can it become another dimension through which to explore his evolution? His BPD is part of his experience, but it doesn't define his morality or excuse his choices. What interested me was understanding what could motivate him to change. His love for Melissa, his friendship with Mario, and the fear of losing those relationships give him something worth fighting for.

The prequel, Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Tale, allowed me to explore his more monstrous side without undoing that development, since its events precede the original novel.

When I began writing Mortal Vengeance II: To Reel or Not Too Real?, I considered whether Alex should try teaching someone another lesson and set another revenge story in motion. But why reset him to his original state? That would be boring and cheap. If you're continuing the story, continue the characters' journeys.

Three years later, Alex hasn't been sanitized. He's not an angel, and his friends should know that by now. He's also been branded the "bad boy," the "evil genius," by Shane Harper's show. Shane needs him to be bad, the audience expects him to be bad, and Alex willingly plays along.

But underneath that performance, he's genuinely trying to put in the work. And I wasn't going to make it easy for him. Throughout the sequel, he's tested repeatedly, and we see flashes of the old Alex threatening to take over. He knows what he's capable of, and what frightens him isn't only the possibility of losing control, but knowing that part of him might actually enjoy it. He also knows what surrendering to those impulses could cost him: everything he's spent three years rebuilding.

So what does genuine growth look like? Is it never feeling those impulses again, or recognizing them and choosing what to do with them? And what happens when the people you love are threatened, and the part of yourself you've worked so hard to contain starts looking dangerously useful?

Alex knows his past actions were monstrous. He knows people see him as a monster. He knows he's playing one on television. But is he still that monster?

Or is it all just a long con?

Now, when it comes to Melissa, I loved reversing her role with Alex's from the first book. Although the sequel labels her the "final girl," technically, I'd argue that Alex occupies that role in Mortal Vengeance.

Think about the slasher conventions. The Grim Cojuelo targets Alex, hunts him, and he survives long enough to be rescued by the hero. And that hero is Melissa. She's initially attacked and left helpless, but ultimately confronts and shoots both killers. During graduation, it's Melissa, not Alex, who delivers the valedictorian speech and, alongside Mónika, demands justice. The genre roles were deliberately inverted.

But at what price? Melissa had to shoot two friends, one of whom regarded her almost as a little sister. She lost one of her best friends and the first boy who entered her life after a toxic relationship. That's an extraordinary amount of trauma to carry.

Yet, on the very first page of Mortal Vengeance II, she's introduced as the "final girl." That's her brand now. She's the nice one, the sweet one, the "Saint With a Shot." Now, splash, splash, Nemo! If you've read the book, you'll understand that reference.

But underneath that image, Melissa is struggling with the guilt of having taken two lives, the trauma she still carries, and her developing relationship with Alex. Opening herself to that relationship means confronting parts of her past she'd rather leave behind. And now she's participating in a reality show where every private struggle could become public entertainment.

Is she really that nice? That ray of light everyone insists she is? Or is that the version of Melissa everyone wants to see?

Her world also expands with the arrival of her cousin Ana Sofía, while Shane Harper's determination to exploit the cast's personal histories threatens to reopen wounds Melissa has spent years trying to heal.

And that's what interests me about both characters. Alex is expected to remain the villain, while Melissa is expected to remain the heroine. Neither is allowed much room to be anything else. And Shane Harper certainly isn't in the business of letting anyone outgrow a profitable storyline.

Which brings me to Alex and Melissa. Melissa and Alex. Malex, if you will.

Now, the book is coming out soon, and I'm certainly not going to spoil where that particular relationship goes. But remember how Mortal Vengeance ends. During her graduation speech, Melissa acknowledges that Alex is being blamed for everything, but she doesn't blame him. Later, when he asks whether he has a place in her future, she tells him yes, although it will take work.

"As friends."

Well, three years have passed. Have they put in the work? And if they have, what does that relationship look like now?

I suppose you'll have to tune in to find out!

FQ: I noticed that the title "To Reel or Not Too Real?" is a clever pun on a famous Shakespeare quote. How did you settle on it?

TORRES DE LA ROCHA: It is! And isn't that the question?

Although, being bilingual, I have to point out that Shakespeare's famous "To be or not to be" could be two questions in Spanish, since we have two different verbs for "to be": ser and estar. But let's not get into an existential and linguistic crisis right now. We've got enough problems!

There's also the little matter of this being a sequel. I wanted to have some fun with the title and find different ways of saying Mortal Vengeance 2 without using the digit. Between the Roman numeral II, To, and Too, I managed to sneak in three different ways of saying "two." And yes, I thought I was being terribly clever. Still do, actually!

But there's a more serious reason behind the title.

Just look at how we present ourselves on social media. We carefully construct personas and curate lives that often bear little resemblance to our everyday reality. It's good for a reel, sure. But is it real?

Nobody wants to expose every intimate detail of their personal life to public scrutiny, and there's nothing inherently wrong with showing people the best version of ourselves. The problem begins when we start mistaking that carefully selected version for the complete truth.

And there's a fascinating contradiction. We constantly hear people telling us to be authentic, to show our true selves, to be real. But the moment you decide to record something, knowing you're going to edit it, package it, and publish it for an audience, you've already introduced an element of performance. That doesn't necessarily mean what you're showing is false. It means it's incomplete.

Then we upload it, hoping people will understand who we are, only to become furious when they form opinions based on what we've shown them. Suddenly it's, "You don't know me!"

Well, of course they don't! They know the version of you that you chose to put online.

And the more engagement a particular persona generates, the more incentive there is to keep performing it. If people love you because you're always positive, what happens when you're miserable? And if everyone expects you to be the villain, what happens when you no longer want to play that part?

That's where Mortal Vengeance II: To Reel or Not Too Real? comes in. The characters are participating in a reality television show where they're supposedly revealing their authentic selves. But they're also performing for cameras, navigating public expectations, and allowing a production company to decide which parts of their lives become entertainment.

So what's real? What's simply good for a reel? And, perhaps more importantly, when does reality become too real?

We demand that people show us who they really are, but how much are we entitled to see? Their relationships? Their humiliations? Their trauma? And what happens when the cameras capture something that was never supposed to be entertainment in the first place?

That's ultimately why I settled on the title. I wanted something playful, theatrical, and immediately recognizable, but also something that would become increasingly uncomfortable as the story progressed.

We demand authenticity, reward fakeness, and fail to recognize reality even when it becomes too real.

FQ: Did you ever struggle with the decision of which characters had to die to serve the story?

TORRES DE LA ROCHA: Yes. A lot!

You should've seen me as a teenager. Back then, I'd create characters just so I could have the "fun" of killing them off. Teenage me needed therapy!

But now, as an adult, when death comes for a character, I genuinely feel bad. I enjoy these characters, their relationships, their interactions, and putting them in situations that allow different sides of their personalities to emerge. So when I have to remove one of them from the story, it really does feel like a loss. And if there's going to be a loss, then that loss needs to be earned and serve the story.

There's a character death in Mortal Vengeance II that doesn't happen at the hands of the masked killer. It's an accident. So why kill that character? And if I was going to kill them anyway, why not let the Grim Cojuelo do it?

Because that particular death serves a much larger purpose. It pushes another character's actions toward horrific, identifiable consequences, reinforcing something I've explored throughout the series: you don't need to wield a scythe or wear a mask to become a monster yourself.

There's a lot of death in this book, and it comes from many different places. Some deaths are brutal, others are tragic, and one happens so quickly that you won't see it coming. Neither did the character! But I wanted every death to have a reason for being there, whether through its immediate impact on the story or the consequences it leaves behind.

Readers might come into the sequel assuming that the new cast members are redshirts, characters introduced to increase the body count while the original survivors remain protected. But that's not how I approach these stories. Nobody is automatically expendable, and nobody gets plot armor simply because they've been around longer.

That's also why deaths from the previous books, especially María's and Julián's, continue to affect the surviving characters years later. Their stories didn't end when they died. Their absence continues to shape the decisions, relationships, guilt, and grief of those left behind.

I try to give my characters enough depth that readers can become attached to them, even when they're minor or secondary characters. And when their time comes, I want to feel that I've explored what they could contribute to the story, whether that's completing an arc, changing someone else's trajectory, or leaving behind consequences that extend far beyond their final scene.

So no, I haven't gone all whack-a-mole up in here, randomly killing characters whenever I need another shocking moment. But that doesn't mean anyone is safe, either. Nobody has guaranteed protection, and I think readers should feel that uncertainty.

There's one particular death in Mortal Vengeance II that was especially difficult for me to write, partly because it wasn't a new decision. That character had already met the same fate in the second installment of my original 1999 trilogy. But revisiting the story more than twenty-five years later, having developed a much deeper understanding of these characters and their relationships, I found myself desperately wanting to change that outcome. I wanted to give that character another chance. And unlike my fifteen-year-old self, I now had the opportunity to do exactly that. The question was whether I should.

After all, I've already demonstrated that I'm willing to reconsider the original story. Mónika, for example, was spared a very different fate when I revisited Mortal Vengeance in 2025. So why not do the same here?

Because, as much as I wanted to, I couldn't justify changing it. Actions have consequences. After everything that happens in Mortal Vengeance II, could I really have everyone walk away hunky-dory, as though none of it had left a lasting mark? Then what was the point? All that suffering, all those choices, all that violence, only for everything to work out in the end without any truly devastating consequences? I couldn't do that.

That death had to remain. Not because I wanted to shock readers or because I enjoyed writing it, but because the story had reached a point where the consequences of everything that had happened could no longer be avoided. And so, with a great deal of pain, I had to bid that character adieu.

And perhaps that's the hardest part of writing these books now. Teenage me was perfectly happy to kill everyone off. Adult me has to live with what happens afterward.

And so do the characters.

FQ: What can your fans expect next from you?

TORRES DE LA ROCHA: I'm currently working on the prequel to the prequel—yes, I know how that sounds. It's called Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Teaching, and it's set mainly in 1961, telling the origin story of two of the series' strongest villains: Profesora Lourdes and Sister María Gracia.

The story begins just as El Generalísimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961, is assassinated. The girls return to Santo Domingo from their boarding school in Miami and spend the summer at their grandparents' grand estate in the border town of Dajabón. Nearby runs the Massacre River—yes, that's its real name—which forms part of the natural border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In 1937, that border region became the site of the Parsley Massacre, the killing of tens of thousands of Haitians living along the border.

It's called A Grim Teaching because that's the question at its center: how do you teach someone to become a monster—and what happens when they believe those lessons make them righteous? Teaching happens at home, through religion, through social expectations, and through watching adults decide whose life deserves protection. Lourdes and María Gracia are learning long before they become the people readers already know.

A Grim Teaching keeps the tension of A Grim Tale and trades the satire of Mortal Vengeance II: To Reel or Not Too Real? for historical fiction. And the historical part, without needing any embellishment, is already scary enough.

The book looks back at how Lourdes and María Gracia became the women readers know, and what they learned about power, faith, family, and whose lives mattered. We already know what they eventually become capable of. Now we get to see what they were taught—and what they chose to do with those lessons.

It also connects directly to Humberto and some of the events in Mortal Vengeance II. Although the story takes place mainly in the past, part of it unfolds in 2020, so readers will see how that family history carries forward into his story and the events of Book Two. We're going further back, but we're also filling in pieces of what readers have already witnessed—and perhaps changing how they understand them.

For more information about Mortal Vengeance II: To Reel Or Not Too Real?, please visit the author's website at: mortalvengeance.com