If you’ve been keeping up with my reviews, you’ve probably seen me mention Bowery a couple times. It’s one of my favorite reads of the year. It made me feel things. Bad things. And I like that in a book. It’s why I read so much horror and why much of that is extreme or splatterpunk.

When Vaughn announced that he was writing a sequel, I was ready for it. I snapped it up and read it immediately. I posted a brief review on Goodreads and read more of Vaughn’s work while I waited for part two, because why wouldn’t I. That review is as follows.

This book begins to answer some lingering questions left behind by the first book. We learn more about the mother cow, her purpose, and how she is maintained. We get more details about most of the things I felt was missing from the first book. We’re starting to learn about the people running the bowery. All of this is revealed through the story of a single abduction and her introduction to her new life as a cow. But she is a special case. The powers that be decide they want to inspect her personally and she ends up seeing more of the inner workings than most do. It is brutal and bizarre and I want more. There are still a lot of questions, but it’s looking like Vaughn will be expanding on this series and I’m here for it.

I wanted more.

And then I got more. One evening I received a copy of part 2 in my email. I opened the book at 2:30am and found exactly what I had hoped for, a subtitle indicating that this was an origin story for the mother cow. And then I found my name among many other wonderful reviewers and authors in the dedication page and it just made my heart happy. Which was a good thing because I knew that Vaughn was about to wreck it again with this story.

Bowery 2 part 2 tells the story of a walled in village surrounded by a forest where a demon roams. The wall has been successfully keeping the demon at bay until the day he decided he was going to go into the village and take what he wants. He demands a sacrifice and the villagers band together and force one family to give up a child each time the demon returns. When the demon decides he wants to satisfy a different kind of hunger, the patriarch of the family snaps. Not at the demon, of course. He’s not stupid. But he is short sighted. He should have known that the demon would not be happy with his actions. The demon wasn’t going to just move on when his source of tasty morsels was gone. He should have also known that he wasn’t going to be able to tend his farm alone, and since travel between villages wasn’t a thing given the demon forest, he would eventually starve to death. What’s a guy to do? You’ll have to read it to find out. Be warned though, it is bleak.

Big thanks to Matthew Vaughn for the ARC of part 2. You can get these and more on Godless for pocket change. Go on, do it.