“I just want this book to go on a little longer.” … Says the guy who has been known to read the appendices after finishing a particularly satisfying and engrossing book. And thus are born sequels. Yes, I can think of a few cases where the sequel was just as good, or even better than the original, usually because the writer got more skilled at his craft than he had been at the beginning. Occasionally, because the author PLANNED it that way – it was never a one book story. Mostly… because people wanted it (including, sometimes, the author) and we’re in the business of pleasing our readers.
Sometimes, of course, it’s just an afterword. I’d be curious about your milage on these. I’ve had a rough week (a pallet of concrete blocks (not a small thing) has gone missing. No one seems to know where such a tiny little object could vanish to) so I retreated into a Louis L’Amour to get my tone of mind back.
I happened to read one I haven’t read for many years – The High Graders, and I can safely say I understand why I haven’t. There were a number of what I considered continuity errors and logic flaws – but I could let that pass. I really didn’t bind to the heroine. I like my heroines to be at least marginally effective and intelligent. Not forgetting to take their gun with them on a dangerous mission, or, when under careful guard because they’re under threat, deciding to go off on a little ride – without the bodyguard.
I’ll forgive a lot, in a bit of escapism, but I do like to leave a book feeling, well, uplifted and hopeful. Yes, I know. Not everyone is like that, some are very happy to leave the book feeling deeply moved, etc.
This particular book had an afterword of sorts. And that sealed my ‘I won’t bother to read this again’. If it was my first book by the author, I would have avoided others. The entire war between the miners and cattlemen… the mines played out, and cattle business never recovered, and the town – all those hopes, became a ghost town. The heroine lived to an old age and just wasted away when one of her grandsons became an ad man on Madison Avenue (ok, understandable). And the hero vanished to a lost cabin in the mountains, presumably to die. A few other details were wrapped up… and it was made clear that everything had passed and been forgotten, and the last person who knew the story wasn’t telling anyone. Perhaps it was poignant, but I came looking uplift not poignancy. The old Norse belief that a man dies twice, the second time when he is forgotten, rings a strong bell with me. I closed the book, feeling depressed.
It was probably realistic. Towns blossomed and died, hopes came to nothing much. But I did not want that end. I was left feeling, well, robbed of what I had hoped to find in the book – a bit of uplift. If the author had left it just after the last shoot-out, when the hero is alive, the villains dead, the girl won and the doctor there to see he doesn’t die – I might have wished for a little more, but that was the right place to stop.
Some books are not meant for sequels. Some afterwords are not meant to be written – no matter how much we might like a little more.
Mad Genius Club 
15 responses to “When to Stop – or a little more.”
Comments on Goodreads suggest that your reaction to this particular Louis L’Amour is widespread.
I remember in The Reaches, David Drake wisely ended the series right after the defeat of the Armada, with the main character basically begging the protagonist to let that be enough.
Because by that point, most of the main characters have resolved their issues and are set on good paths.
However I looked up what happened with Sir Francis Drake after his defeat of the Spanish Armada. And he did not let that be enough, and essentially squandered the remainder of his life on fighting the Spanish to no useful end. By ending it where he did, I at least got to avoid seeing that.
That said, epilogues can also just not work. The Raj Whitehall series has an epilogue that consisted of the Computer offering projections of what was expected to happen, which was really not fulfilling, because even in universe, they are just predictions, not things that have happened. It just kind of deflated the triumph of the ending for me.
I guess my rule of thumb is never steal the victory from the heroes in the epilogue.
And as I understand it, that was part of why Tolkien never wrote any books set after the Lord of the Rings: they would have had to deal with the slow decline and undermining of Gondor and everything the Fellowship had worked for.
And probably why the Scouring of the Shire worked so well. Despite them finding evil had taken hold in their homes while they were gone, as much as anything, it shows how much evil has truly diminished as a result of their quest. It’s no longer a great doomsday stalking the lands. Rather it’s a band of more or less rabble chewing at the corners, and now almost comically easy for good men to disperse. Which they do.
I know a lot of people dislike the extended ending to the Princess and Curdie, where things go fine in the title characters’ lifetimes, but within a few generations the city folk have returned to their vicious ways, leading to the collapse of their city. I remember the first time I read it I was more “Whuh?” than anything else, not having read anything edgier than The Hobbit or the Jungle Book. After I reread it and saw the foreshadowing of just how messed-up the city was, it made more sense. The good guys make their happy ending, but they can’t make other people’s happy ending. And that tied into reading Silmarillion later, which taught me a lot about seemingly sympathetic people making a hash of things, which kind of braced me for the impact of real history, where you get a lot of people with a very mixed impact on the world around them.
I could also mention Jane Austen, who tends to give the good guys happy endings, but also points out that the less-good people don’t get much comeuppance in this world. And I have personally written at least one ending where the heroine foresees a painless death in old age for either herself or her husband, maybe both (look, this was first drafted in like 2010 and published in 2016, it’s been a while).
All that being said, I really don’t get why you’d saddle a plain vanilla “dime western” as some of the reviews online call The High Graders, with such a downer epilogue. It doesn’t seem to be closely based on historical events, or anything like that. Then again, I guess the book of True Grit did something similar?
I must admit to hating the fall of Gwyntystorm. A painless death is one thing, futility another.
I mean, it’s not futile. The good people of that generation, like the miners, benefited. It’s just that nothing lasts forever. To quote one of the authors MacDonald influenced:
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
in the U.S., pallets of concrete bricks appear just before a protest by a certain polity.
is someone displacing them to here via portal or wormhole? (~_^)
oh-0h. You’re in trouble then. These weigh around 28 pounds each. Mind you, someone who can throw one of those is trouble even without one.
Ah! Blocks (me brain read it as Bricks). Still a rather large, near immovable item to misplace.
Way back, in the 1980’s i worked at a bike shop in a getting to be questionable portion of New Orleans and the owner decided to have some nice big display windows. Said window was attacked one night by a “local youth” who tossed such a block at the window, and almost got beaned by the rebounding block. the “glass” was Lexan brand and set in 2 layers separated 1.5 inches of construction 2x4s so they had free movement to flex. The kid who lived across the street risked walking down to the nearest pay phone to call the police, who were not responding to the alarm. They had finally broke one of the main plate-glass windows and tried to pry the bars inside apart. They got some cheap clothes was all. Sirens were heard and they cut and ran. Was an Ambulance for the hospital some blocks away, and the police showed up after the owner and manager were assessing how to seal it for the rest of the night. One of many reasons I dislike NOLA.
I often stick Bonus scenes at the end, but they’re more to tie up loose threads, or amusement. Absolutely not to mess up a good (winning) end.
That’s something that I will need to watch out for when I finish Book 4. I need to end the war between France and Texas while at the same time leaving enough tension between the two countries to make the next story arc interesting.
Shouldn’t be too hard with de Gaulle running France. 😂
There are a couple of movies I’ve seen where it just needed to end at a particular place and be done, and not continue on.
AI was one of those. There was a perfectly good ending place, and that got screwed up, and then there was a second ending place that wasn’t great, but could be dealt with, and they screwed that up, too. Just wretched.
*Nods* House of the Long Shadows. Stupid movie, has a decent twist ending (all a LARP at the obnoxious protagonist’s expense) with only an average amount of plot holes. Has a second twist ending (none of it happened even as a LARP, it’s just the protagonist imagining the novel he’s writing) that’s poorly edited and seems to exist solely as an ego boost for the nepo kid playing the protagonist. (His character comes off as a buffoon at the mercy of the LARPers initially and then the second twist gives him agency over the events and a shot at wooing a lookalike to the woman who was one of the LARPers before the second twist.)
A.I. Artificial Intelligence? You mean the world’s longest Folgers commercial? Seriously, that last scene looked so much like it was selling coffee that it completely drowned out all my other thoughts about the movie.
I have a WIP for which I have two sequels already written. Novelettes, but I had to keep them from swelling the denouement somehow.
And The Other Princess has a sequel in the first draft. The Other Prince. Who is the princess’s great-grandson.