"In my experience, the only way to survive in this world is to find something to live for." (Kent)
There's one thing that I can't stand... a love triangle that is drawn out for the sake of creating tension and drama.
The beginning of Dance of the Red Death is slow and boring. This is because the love triangle takes center stage. In Masque of the Red Death Araby realises that Will has betrayed her and that Elliot has feeling for her. In Dance of the Red Death three fatal love triangle flaws occur. They are:
1) The plot is forgotten, because apparently romance overtakes finding a way to save the city.
2) Araby's feelings and emotions are all over the place when it comes to her love interests. She's clearly undecided and leads both Elliot and Will on.
3) One of the love interests are made to look bad so that the other love interest is an automatically accepted final choice.
Apart from the love triangle, there are so many issues that I had such as deaths that don't mean anything to me, intriguing characters that have the potential for development but end up being undeveloped, villains without any clear motivations for their actions and an anti-climatic ending.
But, there are three things that I certainly enjoyed in Dance of the Red Death:
1) Araby's character development. In Dance of the Red Death, Araby isn't the same trusting person that she was in Masque of the Red Death. She becomes questioning and eager to know what's really going on. She also doesn't believe the things that she sees anymore. Araby becomes her own person. In Masque of the Red Death, she's dependent on April, Will and Elliot, but in Dance of the Red Death she starts to stand up for herself.
2) The world. Bethany Griffin creates an amazing world filled with so much of riches, luxury and wealth, but also so much of blood, decay and death. Dance of the Red Death also features some cool inventions that tie in with the Steampunk genre. Without the richly described world that Griffin's built, Dance of the Red Death wouldn't have amounted to much.
3) The Plague. I really enjoyed the whole idea of the Masque of the Red Death series revolving around an incurable plague. Whenever I was reading Dance of the Red Death I was constantly thinking about The Black Death. Imagining something from a fictional book that has a correlation to what has happened in History and could happen in the future is terrifying.
Dance of the Red Death has an awesome world and so much of potential for character development, but it's over-shadowed by a drawn out love triangle.
"There's always hope." (Will)