Author and editor Nick Harrison asks if a book can be published, and if published, can it sell if it has a sad ending. “I like a sad ending that offers hope, but I think those of us who feel that way are in the minority,” he says. “A sad ending in a book for our market has an uphill struggle…”
I don’t think sad endings have a hard time finding a home in just the CBA market. You never see a proper tragedy in culture at large anymore.
I don’t think they sell all that well. Straight to Hell, my Michelle Scott is a cozy, chick-lit with AT BEST an ambiguous ending–but in reality a downer of an ending. Sure it’s a sequel and sure, we hope for a better ending in the next one. But the truth is, the character had to do some pretty sad things there at the end. It took chic-lit and gave it a whole new genre: Chic-lit noir.
As a reader, I’m still going to wish for a happy ending in the subsequent books.
by Michelle Scott. Sorry…
Honestly, my most typical Christian-fiction foray was ended when they un-wrote a sad ending.
[Spoiler warning for The Mark of the Lion trilogy]
I felt the martyrdom at the end of Francine Rivers Mark of the Lion series was beautiful and uplifting, giving her a triumphant ending not based in worldly happiness.
When it turned out, at the beginning of the second book, that she wasn’t dead at all I felt betrayed. I never read the third book.
Also, if I had to point out my objection to the CBA market as a whole, it would be this quotation:
“Books that I’ve read that left off with just plain heartache left me feeling too broken for me to feel satisfied with the book. I’ve even lost sleep over it when I finished right before bed. Life itself is so painful at times, when I escape into fiction I don’t like to be left feeling heartsick.”
Now the thing is, the quotation itself is not bad per se. The uses of fiction are many, and I have no quibble with someone who wants it to be an escape from heartache. But Christian fiction, if it were to live up to its name, ought to be an incarnational descent into heartache, with a perspective that amplifies the wrongness of our sins even as it offers the hope of God’s cosmic comedy.
Within that scope, I think there is room for diversity: comedies that skim the surface, joyous tales focusing on heavenly or earthly joys, dark tragedies depicting the consequences of sin, &c. But too many people associate Christian fiction with *safety*, rather than with its ultimate allegiance. If fiction is to share its heart with “the man of sorrows, well acquainted with hardship,” then the standard expectation should be for stories that make us weep for the sorrows that even yet fill the world, not for stories that depict a safe haven free from heartache.
It’s not, in other words, that Christian fiction is all bad, but that the default expectations of the genre feel so far from Christ’s life and heart.