!SPOILER ALERT! I will be mentioning by name the death of a secondary character in a Nora Roberts’ Circle Trilogy book, and characters in a Joss Whedon film, so if you’d rather not know, don’t read further.
Okay…
I’m the the middle of reading Morrigan’s Cross
So this isn’t any well thought out treatise, but rather my thoughts this morning in case anyone else could add to this.
Anyway, here’s how my reading experience went last night when I got to that part of the book: I completely missed that he was dead. Sure, I read the lines where he was drop-kicked over the edge of a cliff, but it didn’t click with me that that equaled truly dead (it also happened extremely quickly). So I’m reading further along and the other characters are all angry and weepy and I’m confused, because my brain hadn’t registered it. I kept expecting for it to be a mistake, for King to stumble back and say “I’m not dead, caught a ledge guys” and everyone breathes a sigh of relief. But it hasn’t happened (yet) and this got me to thinking:
is it harder to convince a reader of a character’s death when writing paranormal fiction?
heck, even Sherlock Holmes survived a fall like this. Are we now trained to think that if we don’t actually see the death, it hasn’t actually happened in fiction because too many times authors have pulled the gotcha?
Even if you do pull a gotcha (And Nora might still pull one with King; I haven’t finished it yet), as a writer you’d want the reader to still believe the death happened. But you don’t want to yank them too much and this book is a great example of this. I remember thinking when these characters who make up the team were first getting introduced that I hoped Roberts wasn’t going to kill one of them, and that if she did, I’d be really pissed. But when it happened, I didn’t throw the book at the wall, so she’d skillfully not gotten me too invested in the character. Looking back, he’s the only one, besides Larkin, whose head we haven’t hopped into, Nora-Roberts-style. And killing off a team member is a great device to show the stakes are real (Serenity!). But even in Serenity, we saw both Book and Wash truly die. The stakes were real and felt/mourned at the time. Here, I’m not feeling it, yet I wouldn’t have wanted to feel it too much. So it’s definitely a hard line to navigate.
Anyway, that’s it. Just wanted to put this out there and see if anyone else had thoughts on this 🙂
Do you think it’s harder to pull off a death in paranormal fiction? Have you read this book–what was your reaction? (don’t tell me the end)
Janice Hardy asks 
