It seems to be a virus affecting fiction for kids, particularly of the sci-fi and dystopian persuasion. Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go, winner of the 2008 Guardian Children's Fiction prize, was enthralling from the first page – Todd, the young narrator, victim of a planet-wide sickness that forces him to pick up other men's psychic noise, can even hear his dog's thoughts (usually along the lines of "Poo, Todd!" "Good poo", and "Tail, tail, tail"). Women are immune to the thought-receiving disease, which sets up a horrifying plot twist three-quarters of the way through. By now the book would be occupying an honoured place on my Shelves for Eventual Possible Infants, were it not that it has fallen victim to the pernicious disease of cliffhanger-osis.
Old radio serials, such as the recently replayed Dick Barton, Special Agent, thrived on cliffhangers of the most outrageous kind, bringing their youthful audience slavering back for more every weekday evening. That made perfect sense. For a 480-page novel to appal its readers with a hideously unresolved situation and an endpaper indicating that they should tune in to the next instalment six months or a year in the future makes no sense at all. Knife's sequel, The Ask and the Answer, has just this second appeared in my local Borders.
Aware that trilog-itis is nowadays almost as pervasive as cliffhanger-osis, I had intended to be spitefully wary: rather than risk another smack in the face on page 400-and-something, I thought, I will steer clear until all possible books have been published and then steal into my local library and read them in situ, denying their author even the pittance of PLR. That'll teach him. But having circled the shop like a stunned bluebottle for a good 10 minutes, wrestling with the urge to be mean and petty-minded, I eventually succumbed and shelled out £10.99 of the hard-earned. More fool me. Perfectly readable, but it doesn't live up to the instant-classic heft of book one. And guess what? It ends with a cliffhanger.
The same goes for Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games. I enjoyed the book intensely – a deft and original amalgam of Battle Royale's last-man-standing kids-as-gladiators conceit with the Cretans' Minotaur tribute of lot-chosen youth, although the slightly garish, try-hard cover design featuring a choice of protagonists depending on your skill in origami was a bit off-putting. Hunger Games' cliffhanger wasn't as cruel as Knife's, Collins having the grace to leave readers with a pin-thin epidermis of closure – the victorious but peccable protagonists on a government-controlled train, chugging off back to a putative heroes' welcome.
But the author makes it clear throughout the book, and spells out in the interview at the end, that those who challenge the powers of the Capitol tend to meet grisly ends, and the first notes of unease are already being stridently sounded in the closing pages of Book One. Since Book Two is not due to appear till January 2010, I wish Collins had let the kids get home and enjoy a bit of triumph and relaxation. I can wait for the evil shenanigans to kick off again. I'm certainly not going to stay on tenterhooks till next year.
I have nothing against trilogies or series per se – if the book is meaty and satisfying, the more the merrier. I only ask that each member of the family be complete unto itself – enjoyable individually as well as as a constituent of a reading orgy involving all its siblings, à la Lemony Snicket or Lian Hearne. Elizabeth Knox's The Rainbow Opera, stood up boldly by itself despite being marketed as part of the "Dreamhunter Duet", and I will shortly be snaffling Part Two, The Dream Quake.
The woeful thing is that cliffhanger-osis tends to attack good books – novels strong enough for Potter-hungry publishers to offer multiple-book deals – and so is both frustrating and unnecessary. I hate the feeling of falling-stomached betrayal I get when I reach the last page of a book and experience the '"freeze-frame" effect of a cliffhanger. It's a sensation I'll take pains to avoid in the future.
