Buttercup's Baby

Buttercup's Baby is the long awaited sequel to The Princess Bride. Very long awaited, because as far as I know, we are still waiting for it. In fact there never seems to have been any effort put towards actually finishing this book.

The 1998 printing of The Princess Bride includes the first chapter of this book. It begins with a long segment about William Goldman learning of the sequel, and then wanting to do the abridgement, only to find out that Stephen King (Needful Things, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, etc), was already supposed to do it. Goldman meets with King, and King agrees to let Goldman do the first chapter, to see how it turns out. Now of course all this is fictional (which is what some people on the Princess Bride message boards do not realize), it is merely a way to give us a little more story, without writing a whole new book. Of course a lot of people actually believed the bit about The Princess Bride being an abridgement as well. Some people will just believe anything.

In Buttercup's Baby we follow Inigo Montoya, Westley, Buttercup, and Fezzik from exactly where the last book left off. They journey to an island where Westley and Buttercup make love for the first time (although the book infers that it wasn't actually Westley's "first time"). Buttercup ends up pregnant (they always do, don't they?), and has some trouble in delivering the baby. The baby is saved when Fezzik is overcome with a spirit who knows how to properly perform a caesarean section. One nice change to most fairy tales is that Westley and Buttercup do not bother to get married before having a child (or if they did, it must of happened on Dread Pirate Roberts' ship, but I certainly don't remember it).

Somewhere in all of this we get a long flashback that shows us a new side of Inigo Montoya, the romantic Inigo. Sadly enough, we don't get to see what happens with his woman. Something must have happened to her though, as she isn't around in The Princess Bride, and people don't tend to break up very often in fantasy fiction.

The "book" ends in a real cliffhanger, with Fezzik jumping off a huge cliff to save Buttercup's Baby from a truly dreadful fall of several miles. They are still falling when the chapter ends.

Things we do know about this book.

• The version of Princess Bride that included the first chapter of Buttercup's Baby came out in 1998. Since then there has been absolutely no news about this sequel. Although various fan fiction authors have written their own chapters, but that hardly counts.
• It starts out exactly where the first book ended, with everyone running away from Humperdink. Wesley should have never let him live.
• The first chapter is called "Fezzik Dies", so I guess we know what happens to him.
• The baby is supposed to be named "Waverly".
• The big bad guy in this adventure is supposed to be a wizard called "The Madman".
• Much of the book is supposed to be about Inigo Montoya's past.