OK, with the spoiler alerts dispensed with, let’s buckle down to business…
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You see, at the end of The Assassin’s Prayer, Travis Kain dies in a hail of gunfire as he sacrifices himself to save the woman he loves. It was not the ending I envisioned when I conceived the novel, but it came about organically, the natural progression of the story unfolding. It also played nicely into one of my favorite themes: redemptive sacrifice. You see, Kain is a contract killer, and while I make it clear that he never targets innocents, he still kills for cash. Nobody is going to mistake him for some kind of saint, so what better way to atone for his sins than an act of sacrificial love?
Problem was, it was not what readers expected and for damn sure was not what they wanted. Nobody cared if it was the “right” ending … it was not the ending they expected. After a brief burst of skyrocketing sales, the negative reviews started popping up and the “epic backlash” Mr. Mitchell had predicted started to take its toll and The Assassin’s Prayer gradually downgraded from bestseller to meh-seller.
The “artist” in me knows Kain’s death was the correct ending, but it wasn’t until I watched the season finale of SIX that I fully realized what I had done to readers. Because SIX had the audacity to make me root for the redemption of Richard “Rip” Taggert, a former Navy SEAL who got all twisted up inside and executed a man in cold blood, and then after Rip earned that redemption, ended the season by having him gunned down. As I watched the bullets strike the character in whom I had become invested, I wanted to grab the producers/screenwriters by the throat and yell, “Why would you do that to me?”Because making Rip Taggert pay for his sins in blood was a ballsy, righteous move … but it was definitely not how I wanted his story arc to close. At that moment, I understood how many readers felt as they read the last few pages of The Assassin’s Prayer and discovered there would be no happy ending.
So how ‘bout it? Do authors have some sort of obligation to give readers what they want? From a purely commercial viewpoint, the answer is probably yes. These days, gratification is the name of the game and challenging readers with grim, downbeat, nontraditional climaxes will, more often than not, piss off those readers because you failed to give them what they want. And angry readers do not make the best fan base.
That said, there is an argument to be made that authors should just tell the story as it’s meant to be told, to follow the ebb and flow to whatever conclusion is logical and appropriate, even if that runs counter to readers’ wants and expectations. Then again, even as I type the previous sentence, I detect a whiff of latent pretentiousness in my own words, an unwanted and unintended insinuation that what readers want is less important than what the author wants. Ultimately, a balance must be struck.
Sure, anyone can be an author. But if you want to be a read author, then you need readers, and that means factoring their wants into the equation. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Does that mean writers must always cater to reader demands? Not just no, but hell no. But authors who ignore reader expectations—as I did with The Assassin’s Prayer—do so at their own peril.
Then again, Jack died at the end of Titanic and it still made almost $2 billion, so you just never know…
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