See, here’s the thing about certain genres: disaster porn, adventure genres in general… there are good guys, there are bad guys (or at least natural disasters), and the relationship between them is a major part of the story. The opposition may even be accidental (oops) or offstage (long, long ago), but it kinda has to exist, and thus the story has to deal with it to some degree. Often it is the primary conflict of the story. And when the conventions are uncertain to the reader…

Sigh. I just read a book… (you know where this is going…) from an author (new to me). I picked it up casually (Kindle Unlimited) as a standalone (it seemed to be a one-off, or at least not labeled as #x of y, so I took it for a standalone and left it at that since I want to start with a first book in any series). For cheap loans/purchases, I don’t necessarily do a lot of research on an author — I let the blurb have its natural effect.

In prepping for this article I went back and checked. It turns out to be book #1 (at least I got that right) of a (wait for it) 168-book series. So far. Wish they’d put that on the cover.

Well, it’s gonna be the only one I read, and that’s a shame, because I could maybe have been acquired.

Let me explain the problem.

The basic premise is that there is an uncredited mysterious EMP disaster in the USA, and people have to deal with that. In this initial book, the heroes are a four-woman military squad just returned to a US base after a deployment. When the power goes, they jointly decide to desert (with reluctance) and separate to join/save their families, and they agree to rendezvous at the squad leader’s remote cabin, families in tow. Each of them has places to go, security to engage.

So far, so good. Basic chaos/fighting local baddies work follows for each of the four whom we track as independent threads. That part is well done and plausible enough.

Now, the whole time (the whole book), there is no focus on where the EMP came from, who the enemy is (or natural disaster), and so forth. As a reader, I’m OK with that, since we have no news sources broadcasting, so the suspense is plausible, as long as it’s dealt with at the end.

But now (in retrospect — wasn’t necessarily obvious when it started) the reader-retention problem begins. We begin to see that all is not just chaos and opportunistic mayhem. There is some sort of organization involved, either homegrown or something else. The members wear an affiliation mark — that’s all we know — and they’re on the side of collecting useful people for sinister or survival purposes.

Again… so far so good. All will no doubt be revealed later. But now… Well, they know, in their various locations, who the four heroines are, and where they come from. They know everything about them — background, skills, families, destinations, secret code words, etc. and they’re after them.

Short of time travel, fantasy, or other SFF props, this raises, um, questions in the mind of the reader. The reader has seen that no communications took place between the heroines after the adhoc in-person conversation to part and reconvene. In a time travel or magic context, the enemies could have managed to acquire this knowledge somehow, but as given? No. Not even the military that they deserted knows the explicit plans. There is no hint that there will be a genre shift to SFF (alien tech, time travel, etc.), so that’s out as an explanation.

So, heroine by heroine we are led thru the family rescue scenarios with unexpected (“the enemy knows everything you think is secret”) resistance difficulties. They are taunted with superior knowledge, and their morale is also targeted, with declarations that they are uniquely to be captured and thwarted, complete with knowledge of how they deserted in the first place, and all security knowledge about their hideaways.

I’m not saying that such a plot can’t be made plausible (or interesting). But it would require an SFF or similar framework (time travel, aliens,) or some sort of national security ruse/betrayal/war, none of which is in evidence (or an untrustworthy narrator). Add to this that (since I hadn’t noticed there were another 167 entries waiting in the wings), I was anticipating a reasonable ending scenario before running out of pages so I could go to sleep, and getting increasingly frustrated as it became clear that nothing like that was going to occur. 🙂

Now, I could skim the synopses for the remaining 100+ entries to take the sting out of this to talk myself into continuing, or I could turn it into an object lesson.

It’s on me that I didn’t notice this was first in an interminable series, but surely the author might provide a buyer clue in his ad, like a book-number.

More importantly, the author is responsible for the reader frustration when he inserts un-explained capabilities to make tight chase scenes more perilous (“Oh, no! They know where that secure location is, too!”) Once or twice raises tension. Many times implies facts not in evidence, and those should either be eventually (and I mean in the same book) accounted for or reasonably (however referenced) postponed to “temporary mystery” status appropriate to the genre conventions.

My reader experience as more and more liberties were taken with un-earned enemy knowledge is not the sort of thing that endears you to readers. It’s not that I needed all doubts settled — even one peek into mysteries/missing likelihoods would have removed the feeling of being taken advantage of. One doesn’t need answers, necessarily, but one doesn’t want arbitrary action, either.

[I’ve caved, and glanced at the blurbs of some of the 167 other entries. It’s not clear that they involve the same incident as this first book, though that’s my assumption. Each one seems to be set up as a new character/s in a different location reacting to an EMP event. Is it the same EMP event as the first book with its unexplained villains? Who knows? I won’t be finding out. What could be better than engaging in that suspense for 167 more books, with no promise of answers even then? (OK – I cheated. I checked the blurb for the last (so far) book 168. It’s no different. I also peeked at the reviews. It seems clear that each book is envisioned as a stand-alone with different characters, that is, there is no obvious evidence of any evolving external series story of EMP cause or reaction, just 168 stories of emergency reaction by local heroes. So… no explanations about mysterious causes, mysterious character knowledge by enemies, etc. Just an ongoing (open-ended from the point of view of overall story closure) fictional set of handbook entries for what to do in such an emergency. Who needs 168 of those in the same world? (But who am I to argue…he obviously has an audience.)]

Yeah, I’m cranky about this one. But, hey, it also teaches me a lesson about being careful about what my own readers would reasonably expect, especially for a first-in-series. Don’t leave your own readers frustrated… set their expectations appropriately for continuation.