Thursday Tip

Pro tip to authors—don’t kill the dog. This goes double, maybe triple for pups who are much loved main characters.

I was reading a new-to-me author, Patrick Ness. The book? The Knife of Never Letting Go. It’s a decent enough, if depressing, tale. The best part is that the animals could talk. Granted, they could only speak at their respective intelligence levels e.g. the sheep could only drone on, repeating ‘sheep, sheep.’ Dogs could say a bit, though not a tremendous amount, more.

About halfway or more through the book the immensely heroic, wonderful pup is unavoidably abandoned, then murdered by the Freddy Krueger-esque villain Aaron.

It was like Bambi, if the authors had killed off Thumper. First Bambi lost his beloved mother to a cold-blooded hunter (just like both human protagonists in the book did), THEN Bambi loses Thumper in an horrifically obscene and gratuitous scene by a serial killer (in book’s case, Manchee the courageous doggy).

This, THIS was no more than a wholly unnecessary, grotesque and heartless plot device.   

Yeah, I flipped ahead (not as easy on a Kindle as it is with a paperback) and the pooch does not come back to life for some odd but wonderful reason. That was it for me. There was no good reason to off the pup. He was a good, fearless, effective character and didn’t deserve such a cheap, plot device-y death. It reeked of I-need-big-event-here-but-what-should-it-be. The author was stuck so he killed the dog thinking it’d move the plot along and it’d be better than killing a human. Fuck no, mes amis. Killing a human character would’ve been much less painful.

So yeah, I quit reading and won’t pick up another book by him again. This pro tip—don’t kill the dog—also includes cats, dolphins, goats, lamas, pigs and chickens.