You'll Never Guess the Ending!

I've always loved a thriller. A quick read with twists and turns and short, snappy chapters- sign me up! Especially when there's a mysterious dead body or a long-dead small town or family secret to uncover. But lately I've noticed something I absolutely HATE in two of the most recent thrillers I read, a kind of trend I wasn't aware was happening until I read two of the books that had been sitting on my TBR list for months, and was disappointed and driven to rage (lol- but really) over the same thing twice in a row. 

The books in question were Never Lie by Frieda McFadden and My Husband's Wife by Alice Feeney. Both super highly rated and beloved books by popular authors in the genre. I figured they were a safe bet for a rewarding read. Well, I was wrong. 

Both books were compulsively readable, I will give them that, but in the end, the same thing had me wanting to throw both of them at a wall. They both did something that I consider not only a kind of 'cheat', but that also just feels plain lazy and like bad writing at the end of the day. I'm going to call this the 'Disingenuous Internal Thoughts' issue.

Listen, I know people lie in thrillers. Part of any good reveal is finding out who wasn't who they said they were, who was harboring secrets, who was not telling the truth (or only half of it, as it may be). Unreliable main characters are the bread and butter of the thriller world. This wasn't that- or not what I would term a well-done unreliable narrator, at least. It was just nonsensical. 

An unreliable narrator might say, 'I gasped when I saw the body'. So you assume they're surprised. But the deceit is in the omission, the fact that you're not invited into their internal thoughts, so all you get is a reaction that could mean more than one thing. The narrator might say, 'I was horrified. How had she gotten here?' and only later the reader finds out this character is actually the killer. Looking back, you might realize they were horrified because someone else moved the body and so they were genuinely shocked to see it where it was, but not shocked the victim was dead. Make sense? On the other hand, here's what doesn't work so well: "I see the body. I'm shocked. Who could have possibly killed him?” - only to, in a final chapter, say "I did it. I killed him.” In this case, you’re having the character wonder to herself IN THEIR PRIVATE THOUGHTS, a question to which they already know the answer. That's not how people work. It's misleading the reader, sure, but not in a clever way. It just looks like a giant plot hole in retrospect. 

I want to avoid going into talking specifically about how either of these books employed this sort of thing, because I can't really do it without giving spoilers, but suffice to say, there were multiple points in both books where one of the characters thought something that could not have been an authentic thought considering what we know by the end. This doesn't work the way other kinds of deceit do, because a character is supposed to be a believable human being, and human beings don't have whole fake lines of thought set in place to disarm anyone reading their mind. The author can give us only a partial window into their thoughts, sure, but outright giving us thoughts that aren't actually true to what the character would be thinking at all- that's a problem. The character doesn't know we're in their head. They're not performing for an audience. If the story was being told breaking the fourth wall, or telling a story in retrospect, you might have more wiggle-room here, but as it stands, it just doesn't work. 

I just don't see a reason for it, especially when you can get around it in other ways. It also makes the character seem not as real- if even their thoughts are just scaffolding for the author to mislead the reader, the character themself starts to seem like a cheap prop, and the story itself loses a lot of believability.

I’ve noticed a lot of hype around the phrase ‘you’ll never guess the ending!” in thriller reviews and blurbs these days. And maybe this signals a trend of authors writing twists for the sake of twists, bent on outdoing one another, even when the twists don’t make sense upon examination. Hot take: it doesn't take skill to write an ending no one guesses if you deliberately mislead the reader by having even the characters' innermost thoughts be inauthentic. Come on, now. I mean, if you opened up the roof of the local pub in the close-knit small town and dropped an elephant in there who confessed to doing everything, I'd also be shocked and not expect it- but I think we can all agree that would also be random and NOT good storytelling. 

I don't know if I've just managed to avoid books that do this so far, or if this is actually a new trend, but I am not a fan. I won't say all McFadden's books are like this one (I read the Housemaid series- it did not do this, to be fair), but she has about a billion of them and this one was consistently listed as ‘one of the best’, so I'm a little wary now. I am more familiar with Alice Feeney and none of her books had disappointed me like this before, but this knocked her off my list of authors I'll automatically pick up every time they release. 

Clearly, everyone doesn't feel the same- different strokes for different folks and all that- but as a reader, I feel personally betrayed when an author uses tactics like this. I feel like people care less these days about writing a cohesive mystery that holds together under scrutiny and more about just packing as many twists in as possible, no matter how illogical they start to seem. It's giving soap opera. It's giving cheap thrills. It's giving no thank you. Because one of my favorite things about reading a good thriller is being able to go back and see all the clues the author expertly laid down and I misinterpreted or didn't string together at the time. The pleasure comes from the puzzle being solvable, but the author skilled enough to lure me away from the right answer by plausible means all the same. I want to look back and go 'ooohhhhh', not look back and go '...wait a minute...' And that's how these last two books I read made me feel. I would rather guess parts of the end ahead of time than have this kind of cheap trick ending.

It kind of reminds me of the only other time I've been immediately put off by a thriller. That book was Not a Happy Family by Shari LaPena. To this day I haven't read anything else by that author, because I happened to read the interview in the back of the book in which she comes out and blatantly says she likes to arrange her books so that anyone could have done the crime and then just kind of arbitrarily picks someone. And let me tell you, the book felt that way, no character particularly poignant or intriguing, all with some kind of anger or angst toward the victims, all kind of interchangeable. I mean yeah, it was unguessable, but it was also highly unsatisfying.

Maybe I'm nitpicky though, because when searching reviews for people who felt similarly, I only found a couple who addressed it. I'm looking at all these reviews saying 'YOU WILL NEVER GUESS THE ENDING' and all I can think is, "well, yeah. Because it's literally not guessable based on what we're given.' To me, that's not a feat on the author's part, that's pretty easy to do if you're being misleading at the cost of the story's integrity. If I can't look back and think 'ohh the clues were there all along', it doesn't feel so much like a delicious twist. It feels more like a gaping plot hole. 

But I want to know about all of you. If you've made it this far listening to me bitch: have you noticed this kind of false internal narration in thrillers you've read? (and which ones, so I can avoid them? haha) Does it bother you or are you more along for the emotional hit and less for the way everything holds together at a closer look (as my friend Chat GPT repeatedly told me is common in readers- and which I’m inclined to believe, given how well these books have done). I'd like to know. If there are really a lot of readers this doesn’t bother, it makes sense why I'm seeing more of it in the genre. If it sells and it's easier to write, why not, right? (why not? my internal author darkly echoes sarcastically, rolling over in their premature grave)