Cliffhangers vs Open Ended Books

Posted by Colin Harvey Feb 19, 2009

I have an unwritten rule about writing reviews. While they're in progress I revise and tweak and polish them mercilessly -- just as I do with fiction. Sometimes all that polishing leaves them so glistening that the reader can see their face in the prose. Sometimes it doesn't quite work out. Sometimes it can be one word that throws the whole thing.

But my unwritten rule is once it's published, it's published.

That doesn't apply to factual errors. If I misspell an author's name or attribute an award to them that they don't have, then that will be altered. But what if I sit back for a few days and then think, Hang on, that's not quite right. What then?

What prompted this was my recent review of J.F. Lewis' excellent Staked.

I concluded with "it's a good enough book that even the author's ending it effectively in mid-scene with the over-used cliff-hanger is almost forgivable."

Something troubled me, and I eventually realized that it was the word 'cliffhanger.'

Staked doesn't end with a cliffhanger at all. (At this point, you may want to look away, not-so-gentle reader if you don't want to know the result) It ends with the protagonist blown to smithereens, which in some ways is no cliffhanger. He's dead. How much less of a cliffhanger can you get? Of course the fact that he's dead already may not make that such an impossible barrier to a sequel, which I think is where I drew that conclusion from. ReVamped could start a la Quantum of Solace some twenty seconds later. We'll find out at a later date, no doubt.

But considering that Lewis concludes his emotional arc with Eric recognizing his feelings for Marilyn, and that the plot arc of the werewolf attacks have been resolved and the mastermind unmasked, it's an entirely satisfactory ending. It's simply that it leaves the reader literally in mid-air. So I'm still unsure whether my first impressions were right or wrong. I think it's open-ended, rather than a cliffhanger. We need a new word for this.

But whatever happens, I'm not changing the article.