I hate finishing books.
There’s this sense of accomplishment mixed with this utter hopelessness. In a sense, the world has ended. Or at least been postponed. The moment you turn that final page, their Universe becomes
blanked-out. History stops. A paperback apocalypse, a hardcover Armageddon, who’d think the rapture came with the closing of a book for the final time, the difference being, between this time and the
previous time, that there is no intention of opening the book back up, no bent page marking a place, no crappy school-given bookmark bearing an out-of-date children’s book character or a pro-book message, nor does the arrogant prick have a page memorized, or, at least, think he has it memorized.
How do the characters respond to this? Do they see the impending blank doom of their literary demise? How does it feel to know that your mortality is based solely on how many pages there are? Do they get angry at the five or six blank pages at the end, which some say are for annotating, but I say are just because publishers are eco-terrorists?
Do they scream at the heavens, “Why, damn you? Do you know what can happen in five or six pages?! Everything, everything, everything, damn it, unless you’re a realist, because detail is your opiate, your drug, your fix. Unless you’re Stephen King, who is awfully fond of twenty-page flashbacks about seeming random and plot-irrelevant objects. Unless you’re Stephanie Meyer, who can spend roughly seventy pages talking about how awesome it is to have superpowers. Okay, then nothing can happen, but in this book, who knows? One could fly to the moon and cure bloody cancer in the space of those six extremely wasteful pages, yet you, the author, choose to kill us all, sending us to our premature afterlife, memento mori, you bastard, we do remember, because we see the stack of otherwise-worthless pages flying at us with each turn of the page, and for some reason you choose to pull the plug, as it were, and doom us all. You cunt.”
Is this the internal scream of every Scout Finch, Huckleberry Finn, and Harry Potter throughout the Literature-verse, as they see their fate flying toward them with all the speed of a simple page turn? What of sequels? Then the Universe is merely stopped temporarily, only to continue in the next book, and perhaps the next one, and maybe even the next one, until the Universe inevitably meets its conclusion. How cocky must Harry Potter have been? Did he boast and bray about his six forthcoming sequels as he sat in the Hogwarts hospital wing, bruised and beaten from his “battle” with Voldemort? How did that cockiness change as the reader came to the end of Deathly Hallows, and finished the epilogue, then began to close the book?
Did Harry look up into the rafters of Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters and scream “’All was well’? No, all is not bloody well! Sure, I got to get with Ginny, have three kids, one with an absolutely ridiculous name, but does that make it al-bloody-right that my story’s bloody ending, right here, right
now? There’s not enough closure! Curse you, J.K. Rowling, you bitch!”
And as Harry screams his last at the publishers, Draco yells, from across the room, “I’m actually gay!” and fangirls the world over either commit mass suicide or rejoice, depending on just what they put into their fan fiction, such as a ménage à trois with Dumbledore, Draco, and Harry where the former two seduce and turn the latter, but I’m getting off-topic.
Returning to my original point, how does one deal with the xenocide of a literary Universe? I’ve killed countless characters, it’s true. Also true, I’ve enjoyed the murder of some.
As I ground the back cover of To Kill a Mockingbird into its innards, its pages, I snarled, with savage delight, “Take that, Scout! Teach you for being the horrible main character/horrible narrator in an equally horrible book that's only really decent in the last few pages! I hope Boo Radley sneaks back and rapes you and Atticus can only, no, chooses to only sit there and say to himself, chuckling, ‘I’m Gregory Peck!’ then is all well. Harper Lee, just die already.”
And with other books, I weep at the demise of the main character I’ve murdered. So hesitant was I to close The Stand and seal the fate of Flagg, for though he is what amounts to the Antichrist, or, rather, Beelzebub, Lucifer, Satan, The Morning Star, The Desolate One, The Fallen One, The Prince of Lies, The Master of Deception, The Adversary, or rather just the Devil, for though he is what amounts to all of these names, he is an unquestionably well-written and fascinating character. Who can fly.
So, returning to my very first thought, I feel both a sense of accomplishment (For I have slain the dragon, ran the marathon, flown to the moon, defeated the Empire, returned the ring to Mordor, whatever metaphor you choose to use, I have completed my goal, that goal being the finishing of the book), and this sense of hopelessness (not only because I have slain the countless number of sentient lifeforms in a literary Universe, but because without this story to read, to pour your soul into, life, for a small period, loses all meaning and you find yourself lost without your small literary companion). Perhaps it’s just me.
But in summation, the literate are murderers. In some cases, this can actually be a good thing. Such is the case with the Twilight series.
