They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot/Literature: Difference between revisions

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* Ramsey Campbell's ''The Overnight'' is a horror novel set at a big-box bookstore in England. Over half of the story is spent setting up the seething tensions and hatred just below the surface in the relationships among the staff. It's hinted that the bookstore is built on ground where a bizarre number of battles and acts of violence have occurred, and that the place has a palpable effect on people's emotional states. The store manager becomes an increasingly unsympathetic, almost grotesque and frightening character, and it's revealed that he's been sleeping in his office for weeks, thus being constantly exposed to the negative influence of the place. At the story's climax, the whole staff is locked in the bookstore overnight to do an inventory. Instead of the obvious payoff to all this buildup, the psychological horror of ordinary people trapped and turning on each other... {{spoiler|some slimy gray monsters come and kill everyone, and the creepy manager turns out to actually be the protagonist, as he is the only character left alive.}} It's like the author got bored with the story he was writing and decided to tack on the ending of a totally different, much less interesting story to wrap it up.

* Hawthorne's ''House of the Seven Gables.'' So many elements could have been fantastic stories (ghost story, mystery, romance, just about any genre, really) and what did it deliver? A whole lot of hot air and a stubborn refusal to say anything bad about the closest thing to a villain the author bothered to introduce. The pain finally ending in the two old people running away from their problems. And it's a classic. ''Ugh.''

** For [[Character Development]]. Why would Moist want to keep the Post Office going when he's no longer an avatar? [[It's Personal]] plus [[Not So Different]] gives Moist motivation and fuels real growth.

** In [[Discworld]], words have power, and a lot of words in one small space makes L-space and results in the words becoming ''sentient''. The letters were alive, and desperately wanted to be delivered - it was their purpose in life. When the place burned down, they effectively died. Discworld physics can be hard to understand if you haven't read the whole series - it's quite complex and comes out in little bits over all the novels.

* ''Debt of Honor'' by [[Tom Clancy]] could have been a very interesting book were it not a purely anti-Japanese/South-East Asia [[Author Tract]]. There are so many possible themes here. The dangers of over-reliance on a purely electronic infrastructure. Japan's relation to the rest of the world and the way it handles its warrior culture with it's purely defensive military. The tensions that are still felt between Japan and the Empire's former conquests. The Japanese economy's reliance on foreign investment and export. The interplay between the American and Japanese governments and the impact the proliferation of nuclear weapons has on the region. As it stands, the book would have completely faded into history were it not for the ending and it's similarity to that one September morning.