Strangenesses
I know I'm posting a lot today, but this just occurred to me and I thought it was worth mentioning, even if it's only about half-formed.
When I'm reading a submission, given that SH is a speculative fiction magazine, I generally expect there to be some kind of speculative element in the story. If the story appears to be set in the modern day, with normal characters going about their lives in a normal American location, then I start to watch carefully for something unusual. If one of the characters never speaks, or if the protagonist feels oddly disconnected, or if nobody but the protagonist seems to interact with a certain character, or if the protagonist keeps having pangs of sadness or regret or misery when they see a certain character, or if there are suddenly no people around in a place that's normally crowded, then one of my first guesses (because we've seen so many such stories) is that one of the characters who appears to be alive is really dead.
And if I can see that twist ending coming, I'm generally not interested in the story. It's been done too many times, and it's usually done as a sort of ha-ha-I-fooled-you surprise twist, the kind of twist that we SH editors tend not to like much.
But we've published at least two stories in which a character who the reader thinks is alive turns out to be dead, and in both of the ones I'm thinking of, it was a total surprise to me, and I thought the endings worked extremely well. (If you comment publicly on this, I'd recommend not giving identifying features of the two stories if you can help it, just to avoid spoilers for anyone who might not've read them.)
I think there were two things that made those endings work for me where the he's-really-dead! endings normally don't:
- First, as we've noted here and elsewhere before, unexpected stuff that feels like a natural outgrowth of story and characters is good; it's the stories that feel like the author's trying to trick you that we don't like. (Of course, plot is revelation management, author is always concealing something, etc etc. But I suspect you know what I mean.)
- Second, and this is the part that just occurred to me, in both of the stories I'm thinking of, there was plenty of obvious fantastical stuff going on in the story, so I wasn't sitting there waiting for the speculative element to appear.
So I guess my lesson for tonight—unless, of course, I'm totally wrong about this, which is quite possible—is that if you want a speculative element to come as a surprise, in a story to be published in a speculative fiction magazine, it might be a good idea to have another obvious speculative element (something that can't be interpreted as a hint that the character is dead) be an integral part of the rest of the story. The more mundane the story appears to be, the more closely I'm likely to be scrutinizing it for surprise twist speculative elements.
