We’ve all met those tiresome people who scoff at intense grieving over a pet. “It’s a cat!” they sneer, never realizing the total and encompassing love we have for our nonhuman family members. How would they feel if they knew how deeply some of us grieve when we say goodbye to characters in book we love?
It’s nothing new. Readers around the world were devastated at the death of Sherlock Holmes, and Arthur Conan Doyle was forced to exhume the character in a new series of adventures.
So many wept when at the end of The Lord of the Rings, unwilling to bid farewell to Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee. I couldn’t bear to see the end of the wonderful Doc Savage novels I adored in my youth.
The love fans feel for their heroes is incredibly strong. Stronger, in many cases, than they have for family and lifelong friends. They are perfect relationships, free of petty betrayals and irritations that come with everyday life in the mundane real world.
This is why superhero characters endure and are revived for generation after generation. James Bond has been battling international foes for three quarters of a century. Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolf Man are eternal.
Paul Wilson’s devoted readers were aghast when he retired his iconic Repairman Jack character, so he returned in several books after the Adversary Cycle books were completed. I understood the need for Wilson to move on with his life and his fiction, but I welcomed Jack’s return with open eyes. Maybe we will even see the good Repairman again. Stranger things have happened.Endgame could have referred to a frantic conclusion to one of the character’s cases.
A big one for me was the end of Bill Pronzini’s Nameless Detective series. I followed these books with unparalleled enthusiasm for thirty years and I had no inking that the series was over when i began reading 2017’s Endgame, but the title should have clued me in.
No, I was floored when I realized it was the end. The final sentence, “It was a hell of a ride while it lasted”, tore my guts out. I felt like my best friend had suddenly died. My best friend did die a few years later, and I can’t say I didn’t mourn for the Nameless series as much as I did for Dennis.
I just finished reading the final book in Robert McCammon’s Matthew Corbett series. The word “epic” doesn’t seem powerful enough to describe the long saga. Ten books, some of which are very long, and I wish it would never end.
Young Matthew Corbett represents all the best potential the human species can aspire to. He’s intelligent, inquisitive, honorable, courageous, determined. Matthew goes up against unimaginably bad people and situations, but he retains his humanity and humor throughout the series — even when he is forced to make hard moral choices.
Matthew is everything we wish we could be. Most of us have to deal with hardships like colonoscopies and loan applications, wretched work conditions and chaotic relationships. Matthew fights the very essence of evil in the books. It’s been an unprecedented pleasure and privilege to accompany him.
Yet how, how would McCammon bring Matthew’s story to an end? His…death? Would he retire from the profession of problem solving, which would be almost as painful?
McCammon came up with a way to wind up the series in a way that isn’t a copout, but also one that honors the character, the series, and his fans. He even draws on a little unexpected science fiction to pull off the magic trick.
And yet it hurts. I don’t want to say goodbye to Matthew. I’ve been fighting and loving and laughing alongside him for twenty-three years. Not as long as I rode shotgun with Nameless on his cases, but enough to have a strong emotional attachment. It almost feels like a physical bonding.
I can go back and re-read the Repairman Jack novels, the Nameless Detective books, the Corbett series, but it feels a little like looking through old scrapbooks.
I miss them all. Lazarus Long, Stu and Frannie, the Chowder Society. I also miss new movies with Jason and Freddy.
At least Hap and Leonard are still kicking, with a new adventure coming from Joe R. Lansdale in August.
We put up with clods at work, annoying neighbors, family members we could do without seeing, but to book nerds like us, the most vital people in our lives live within the pages of the books that bring us so much joy and satisfaction.
Mark Sieber learned to love horror with Universal, Hammer, and AIP movies, a Scholastic edition of Poe’s Eight Tales of Terror, Sir Graves Ghastly Presents, The Twilight Zone, Shirley Jackson’s The Daemon Lover, The Night Stalker, and a hundred other dark influences. He came into his own in the great horror boom of the 1980’s, reading Charles L. Grant, F. Paul Wilson, Ray Russell, Skipp and Spector, David J. Schow, Stephen King, and countless others. Meanwhile he spent as many hours as possible at drive-in theaters, watching slasher sequels, horror comedies, monster movies, and every other imaginable type of exploitation movie. When the VHS revolution hit, he discovered the joys of Italian and other international horror gems. Trends come and go, but he still enjoys having the living crap scared out of him. Cemetery Dance has published his nonfiction collections He Who Types Between the Rows: A Decade of Horror Drive-In and He Who Types Between the Rows 2: Horror Drive-In Will Never Die. He can be reached at [email protected], and at www.horrordrive-in.com.
