WARNING!
Here there be spoilers for the I Hunt Killers series!
Recently, over on the BLog post about the ancient, alternate ending to I Hunt Killers that I unearthed from my hard drive, someone commented:
I thought that was a terrific question, so here’s a long-winded answer. 🙂
First of all, I’m glad Alysa thinks that “everything came to a close beautifully.” At the risk of sounding egotistical, I am enormously happy with the end of the series. I think it clicked into place perfectly. As far as the ending goes, I have absolutely zero regrets.
I know that some people had wished for a specific moment or a cherry on top of a particular sundae. But I feel like the book ends when the main character’s emotional journey has crested. Yes, it might have been interesting to see Jazz actually turn over Billy’s journal to the cops or finally change the screensaver on his computer or have his first sit-down dinner at the Hall house, but… Those are easily filled in by your own imagination and speculation. I want my endings to give you the stuff only I’ve thought of. That’s my job.
So, no — no regrets about the ending.
But…
I do have two teeny, tiny regrets about the series, and they both pertain to Game.
The first is about Connie and her actions at the end of the book, when she goes to New York on her own. I thought I made it abundantly clear that she was doing this despite her own best judgement, that she felt she had no choice if she was going to help Jazz. On page 338, she gets proof that her mystery caller is close to Jazz. So she figures she had better play along if Jazz is going to survive.
But I guess I didn’t make it as clear as I’d wished. A lot of people thought Connie was acting stupidly at the end of Game, and while I intended for her to come across as headstrong and impulsive, I never, ever wanted her to seem stupid. Alas.
The second regret is that I didn’t type the words “To be continued” at the end of the damn book.
I mean, I knew the series was a trilogy, and the publishing world knew, but apparently no one else knew. And a whole lot of people assumed it wasn’t, that I was just jerking everyone around by ending the story on three brutal cliffhangers. I spent about a year getting emails, tweets, Facebook messages, and more, all boiling down to one thing: Is there going to be a third book? Please write a third book!
I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that anyone could think an author would be so cruel as to end a story like that and leave everyone hanging forever!
Anyway, I answered every single person who wrote to ask if there would be a third book, but I assume for every missive I got, there were a number of people who didn’t bother writing at all. I feel so bad that people stressed about this.
So, Alysa, there you go: My two regrets about the Killers series. Given that the trilogy weighs in at nearly 1350 pages (more than that if you count the prequels) and took five years of my life to complete, I can live with those two issues!