WHAT'S WRONG WITH A HAPPY ENDING?

A couple of weeks ago circumstances too mundane to recount led me to pick up a copy of Dean Koontz's LIFE EXPECTANCY. Although I was an enormous fan of Koontz's in high school, I bailed during his period of supernatural-events-are-really-covert-government-agencies-with-sinister-agendas novels. And while I admire the man for breaking the habit (it would've been far easier to coast on autopilot and keep churning out the same book), I never really bothered with his recent output.

So it was quite a pleasant surprise to find LIFE EXPECTANCY such an engrossing read; it was almost like I was 14 again, cracking open WATCHERS for the first time. All the trademarks of a classic Koontz novel were there: thoroughly likable characters, a rollicking twist-laden plot that hooked me right away, the straightforward smoothness of the narrative . . . and the uplifting life-affirming ending.

Which, once the book was closed, I felt guilty for enjoying.

And that, my friends, is a strange feeling. It wasn't as though Koontz came about his denouement dishonestly (quite the contrary--he was very fair with the reader throughout, earning every turn of the story), so why did it feel as if liking this ending was some kind of betrayal?

I think it all leads back to a conversation I had years ago with my dear friend Barb. We'd been discussing our fairly disparate tastes in fiction, when Barb explained to me why she preferred Koontz over Stephen King. And it pretty much boiled down to the fact that Koontz could be counted on for a feel-good everyone-you-like-lives ending. King, more often than not, killed off his protagonists--even the ones you like!

(I should probably add a disclaimer here: This was an apples-and-oranges comparison, since Koontz is not a horror writer, nor do the majority of his works fall under that category; nor do I think King writes primarily downbeat endings--CUJO and PET SEMATARY being two obvious exceptions.)

At which point, I expressed one of my guiding philosophies of writing horror: if you're writing an effective story--if you're plumbing the darkest depths of the human condition, sending your characters into grim and horrific territory--it's nearly impossible for things to return to normal at the end. I mean, what if Jack Ketchum had slapped a happy ending onto OFF SEASON? Even if the rest of the text remained as is, it would've been a monumental failure.

I still stand by that statement. Take for example Brian Keene's THE RISING--for all of its controversies, how else was that story going to resolve itself? Could a small child have survived alone in such an environment? Did you think Ob and his minions were going to ignore him? Or what about J.F. Gonzalez's MATERNAL INSTINCT (later expanded into his novel SURVIVOR)? The story he was telling dictated the plotline went where it did (namely, the grimmest goddamn ending in recent memory), and Gonzalez would have been dishonest with both himself as a writer, as well as his audience, if he had ended it on a positive note.

But, the voices of dissent are asking, where's the dilemma? If Koontz isn't a horror writer, and if LIFE EXPECTANCY is a mainstream thriller, why the guilt? Are you such a cynical bastard that you believe any novel involving life-or-death situations must end with the grimmest of fates?

Possibly.

I've long had a dislike for happy, upbeat stories. Don't know exactly what combination of life experience and artistic influence caused me to feel that way, but anything overtly positive will probably go unread or unwatched by me. It's mostly because most of them are intolerably schmaltzy, saccharine, or otherwise aesthetically offensive (that isn't the case with everything; BRING IT ON and 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU are two examples that can be escapist, light-and-fluffy fun without insulting my intelligence or activating my gag reflex); but also my personal belief that often the most effective stories are those that tell us what we don't neccesarily want to hear.

I have, however, been rethinking that opinion.

Earlier this week I finished reading Bentley Little's THE STORE, one of the scariest books I've read in a long time. Seriously, those of you interested in writing horror would do well to study how skillfully Little uses reality to establish a believable backdrop to his proceedings, and then slowly insinuates his own brand of weird terror into the lives of his characters. It was literally one of the most pervasively terrifying books I've encountered and as I burned my way through it I repeatedly told myself there was no way this was going to end well, the situation was far too dire.

But Little proved me wrong.

I won't divulge specifics, but Little did manage to vanquish his titular menace successfully, in a largely positive, dare I say, cheer-worthy fashion. Yes, he does tack on a coda to the epilogue suggesting other horrors to come, and there is some uncertainty as to the fate of one of the protagonist's daughters, but once again, Little wouldn't have been playing fair if he'd allowed everything to turn out rosy.

So, is compromise the name of the game? Let your hero live to fight another day, yet not remain unscathed? That's how it is in real life, isn't it? Sometimes we lose things that are important in order to learn something valuable, to grow as human beings.

Truthfully, I don't know what place "happy endings," if any, has in horror fiction. I suppose the only way to find out is to keep reading, to experiment in my own work, keeping an open mind for possibilities.

And if I find any, you'll be the first to know.