Each pattern below fails through a mechanism rather than a surface feature. Each ends with a published work that uses the feature successfully because the mechanism is absent or offset by another effect. The full treatment has a longer catalogue, among them the reset hero, the undone ending, the escalation ratchet and the overloaded last volume.
The undeclared decline
Symptom. Early readers like the book until the last chapters and then feel cheated, often angrily, and say the ending was not what the book had promised. Readers who knew nothing of the genre, or who were told what to expect, do not mind.
Mechanism. The undeclared decline invokes a genre’s core promise, lets the reader stake the book on it, and declines it at the end without having shown inside the book that it would. It fails test 3 (Declared decline), and sometimes test 2 (Core promise). The reader is not wrong to feel cheated: by the horizon she was given, the book broke a contract. What she lacks is the sign that the contract was never offered.
Remedy. Test 3 (Declared decline). Find where the promise is first invoked and put the sign of the decline as near it as the material allows: a character who will not answer, one who chooses not to ask, a frame that tells the end. Then name, in the promise inventory, what the book promises instead, and check that it is kept. Do not mend the ending by paying the declined promise after all, which turns a refusal into a cheat.
Exception. No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007, from Cormac McCarthy’s novel of 2005). The film builds a chase thriller around Llewelyn Moss, who has taken drug money, and the killer Anton Chigurh, and then has Moss killed off screen by other men, lets Chigurh walk away injured from a car crash, and ends on the retired sheriff telling his wife a dream. The threat is never met. The film succeeds because its decline is the subject, a sheriff outmatched by a violence that does not keep the genre’s terms, and because its last scenes keep the promise of significance with unusual force; it is also the case that a part of its audience felt cheated, which is the pattern’s cost even where it succeeds.
The genre in costume
Symptom. The book has a genre’s furniture, a dragon or a corpse or a spaceship, and readers of that genre find it slow, thin or evasive, while the writer is puzzled that they read it as a genre book at all.
Mechanism. The genre in costume uses a genre’s semantic elements without its syntax, so that the reader recognises the signs and applies the promise, and the book then pays a different one. It is a failure of test 1 (Shelf) in a mild form: the first chapter shelves the book in one genre and the last pays another, though each chapter is consistent with itself.
Remedy. Tests 1 (Shelf) and 3 (Declared decline). Either give the furniture its syntax, so that the dragon is a threat that will be met, or declare early that the furniture serves another promise, by letting the protagonists treat it as the people of their world would, as weather rather than quest.
Exception. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (2015). An elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, travel through a post-Arthurian Britain in which a mist makes people forget, with an ageing Sir Gawain, ogres and a she-dragon, Querig, whose breath is the mist. Ishiguro told an interviewer for The New York Times that he wondered whether readers would be “prejudiced against the surface elements”, and Ursula K. Le Guin answered on her blog that he seemed to take the word fantasy for an insult. The book succeeds for many readers because its syntax is declared early and kept: the quest is a marriage examining what it has chosen to forget, and the dragon’s death matters because it ends the forgetting.
The volume that owes its question
Symptom. Readers finish a volume of a series and complain that nothing was resolved, or that they were made to buy the next book to learn how this one ends.
Mechanism. The volume that owes its question leaves its own question open at the last page in order to bring the reader back. It is The Ending‘s series hook (Chapter 16) seen from the series’ side, and it fails test 5 (Volume question). It spends the volume’s ending on a proposition, and it often reveals a deeper problem, test 6 (Series step): the series has no question of its own for the hook to advance, so the volume’s question is made to do the work.
Remedy. Tests 5 (Volume question) and 6 (Series step). Close the volume’s question inside the volume, and put the reader’s reason to come back in the series question, advanced a step on the last pages after the close.
Exception. Lee Child’s 61 Hours (2010), the fourteenth Reacher novel. In a snowbound South Dakota town Reacher is protecting a witness against a drug operation; she is killed, Reacher kills those responsible in an underground facility, and the book ends as fuel in the tunnels ignites and he runs for the stairs, with a woman far away watching the news of the explosion. The volume closes its question, the operation and the witness, and owes only its hero’s survival, which an episodic series thirteen volumes old could hardly withhold for long; the next volume, Worth Dying For (2010), followed within months. The hook works once because the form had been declared thirteen times before it.
The deferred answer
Symptom. A series poses a question in its first volume and lets it grow across the volumes, and the final volume’s answer, however clever, seems too small for the waiting, or cannot be given at all.
Mechanism. The deferred answer holds a series question open across volumes without advancing it, so that the reader’s stake grows while the material stands still. It fails test 6 (Series step). Every volume adds to what the answer must repay, and The Ending’s retroactive lens (Chapter 16), fired at the last volume, judges the whole series by it.
Remedy. Test 6 (Series step). Give each volume a step on the series question, a fact learned, a possibility removed, a cost paid, so that the final answer completes a sequence rather than ending a wait. Or declare the question declined, as Worked Analyses shows The Leftovers doing.
Exception. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, which hold the question of Severus Snape’s allegiance from the first volume (1997) to the seventh, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007), where a chapter of his memories answers it. The deferral works because each volume closes its own question and adds a piece of evidence on Snape both ways, so the answer completes a sequence the reader has been assembling.
The recap at the door
Symptom. The second or third volume opens slowly; returning readers skim its first chapters and new readers are lost in them anyway.
Mechanism. The recap at the door delivers the previous volumes as summary before the new volume’s story starts. It fails test 7 (Re-entry) on both counts: the returning reader is told what she remembers, and the new reader is given facts without the scenes that made them matter.
Remedy. Test 7 (Re-entry). Open on the new volume’s situation and deliver what is needed from the past as present consequence, in The Opening Pages’s sense (Chapter 9): a character behaving in a way the previous volume explains and this one shows. Give the new reader the people before the history.
Exception. The television Previously on sequence, which commits the pattern in its purest form, a minute of summary before the story, and succeeds because it is placed outside the episode, assembled from the series’ own scenes, and can be skipped. A novel can do the same with a note or a list of characters before the first chapter, which keeps the summary out of the story it would otherwise delay.
See also: the full treatment, section 4, for the extended catalogue.