Spoiler warning: this review discusses the ending of HappyHead. The twists in Dead Happy are left alone.
Josh Silver’s Dead Happy had one job: pay off the cliffhanger that closed HappyHead.
It does that within pages, then heads somewhere darker and stranger than the first book ever went.
I devoured HappyHead, so the sequel had a lot to live up to. I enjoyed it, and I think it makes the two books feel like one complete story.
READ MORE: Why I devoured Josh Silver’s HappyHead
Welcome to Elmhallow
Dead Happy picks up almost immediately after the first book’s final page.
Seb, is one of the 10 participants chosen to move on to the next phase of the HappyHead program, a government-backed experiment that promises to fix teenage unhappiness.
That next phase takes place on Elmhallow, a remote Scottish island run by a serene and deeply unsettling couple called Ares and Artemis.
Seb is once again paired with the fiercely competitive Eleanor, and the two have to keep up the appearance of a happy couple while the tests grow more extreme.
Hanging over all of it is the question the book’s blurb asks outright: “But where is Finn?”
Where HappyHead felt like a wellness retreat going wrong, Dead Happy’s program feels like a cult. One Goodreads reviewer called it a hybrid of The Hunger Games, Midsommar and The Traitors, which is a fair summary of the mood.
Seb is still the reason to read
The best thing about both books is Seb’s voice.
He narrates in the first person, and the gap between what he says out loud and what he is thinking gives the story its humour. It also stops the reader from ever accepting what is happening on the island as normal.
Silver, a former actor, retrained as a mental health nurse before he started writing, and it shows.
He told US outlet OutSFL the duology was inspired by working in what he called “an inadequate mental health system”, and that he wanted to write a gay teenager whose sexuality was not the focus of the book.
That holds true here. Seb and Finn’s relationship drives the plot, but the story is about something broader: what it costs to hide parts of yourself to keep other people comfortable.
Eleanor benefits most from the extra room. She was easy to dislike in book one, and the sequel gives her far more to do.
READ MORE: ‘Traumaland is dark, twisted and completely unputdownable: a review’
An ending that has split readers
Dead Happy sits at 4.24 stars on Goodreads from more than 2000 ratings, and 4.19 on The StoryGraph.
The praise is consistent: the pace, the tension and the characters.
So is the main complaint. A number of readers found the ending rushed, with important events happening off the page, and several said they wished Silver had stretched the story into a trilogy.
I can see the point. After two books of build-up, the resolution arrives quickly, but it gives Seb the ending he has earned.
Silver told PinkNews he never set out to end HappyHead on a cliffhanger. The sequel closes the story properly, and this is where it finishes.
What about the screen adaptation?
HappyHead was optioned for the screen in 2023 by Taron Egerton and Range Media Partners, as reported by Deadline at the time. There has been no public update since.
There is movement elsewhere, though. Silver’s first novel for adults, Fruit Fly, has been picked up for television by A24 UK after a competitive bidding process, according to Deadline, with Silver attached as an executive producer.
READ MORE: Everything we know about the Fruit Fly TV adaptation so far
If that series lands, it is hard to imagine it won’t send people back to the books that started it all.
Should you read it?
If you finished HappyHead desperate to know what happened next, yes.
Read them in order, though. Dead Happy does not stop to catch anyone up, and the two books work best as a single story.
Dead Happy by Josh Silver is published by Rock the Boat and was first released on May 2, 2024. The audiobook is narrated by Huw Parmenter, who also read HappyHead.
Silver has since written the standalone YA novel Traumaland, and Fruit Fly is out now.
'Traumaland is dark, twisted and completely unputdownable: a review'
Josh Silver’s Fruit Fly is my pick for book of the year so far, so naturally I went looking for what he wrote before it exploded. That’s how I landed on Traumaland, his 2025 YA thriller, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.