Foreshadow This

Every once in awhile a favorite author will let me down. I don’t know about you, but once I find an author I like, I read everything I can find by him or her. This is usually a good strategy and leads me to many other good books.

But over the last several years I have noticed a trend among authors, and many of them favorites of mine, that I find disappointing and disturbing. Worse, I have been unable to finish books I started. The culprit? Foreshadowing. I hate foreshadowing.

I read for entertainment and escape. I love chick lit or beach reads. Light, easy, fast and often forgettable. Sometimes I can’t even remember that I’ve read them. I’m only a little embarrassed by that. I have my degree in English. I’ve read my share of literary giants. I still read them on occasion. But when an author, especially a tried and true author who I have counted on to transport me to other worlds for a few hours, turns to foreshadowing, there is only so much I can take.

Generally foreshadowing is used to set up some tragic event. I’m not so shallow that I refuse to read a book that has tragedy. But when a book tells you over and over that something bad is going to happen…and keeps stringing you along while you wait for that bad thing to jump out at you, my nerves can only handle so much.

It’s like watching a horror movie. The heroine hears a bump in the basement and goes down the steps with the lights off. You and everyone watching knows something terrible is going to happen, but you and everyone watching can’t stop her. It’s agonizing and terrifying at the same time. Personally, I don’t like agony or terror. I avoid horror movies. If it happens quickly, like ripping off a band-aid, I can deal with it. But when that trip down the stairs lasts too long and there are too many false alarms, my nerves can’t handle it. It’s not entertainment.

Barbara Kingsolver is one of my favorite authors. The first book I read of hers was The Bean Trees. I loved the story as much as I loved where I read the book…on various trains riding through Germany, Austria and Switzerland on my first trip to Europe. As I read other stories of hers, Animal Dreams, Pigs In Heaven, I found myself identifying with her protagonists: quirky, flawed women.

Then came The Poisonwood Bible. It is a story about a missionary and his family of four daughters who live in Africa. I found a lot to like in the beginning of the book: her descriptions, characters, the exotic yet dangerous locale. But she kept hinting that something bad was going to happen to one of the daughters. At the end of every chapter, I would be on the edge of my seat expecting that the worst had happened. Who was it? Who had we lost?

But the next chapter would start and they were all fine. After several chapters of this, I gave up. I had had enough. Kill the damn girl, whichever one it is, let us mourn and move on. Please. I have never finished that book even though I have read subsequent books written by her.

Diana Gabaldon is another author who almost lost me with her incessant foreshadowing. I love her Outlander series. It is a little embarrassing that I found the first book in the Romance section of the bookstore. But it’s a series my sister loves so I gave it a try. Actually, it was a selection for a book club I was involved in years ago. So it had to have literary value, right?

I loved the first few books in the series. It was part historical fiction, part romance, some mind-bending time travel with kilts mixed in. Good stuff. Then came The Fiery Cross and the foreshadowing began in earnest. There was going to be a fire. A newspaper clipping from the future confirmed that the whole family was going to be lost in this fire.

Now, with time travel, you’ve got an opportunity to change the course of events. Or do you? Maybe. But the incessant references to this fire, the date of the fire and the turbulent times had me abandoning the book for several years. Only after the next book in the series was published and my sister told me about the stupid fire was I able to finish the book so I could read the next one.

I’m not sure why foreshadowing bothers me so much. Perhaps it is that real life doesn’t foreshadow for us. Generally we have no idea when disaster is going to hit. And I think that is something to be grateful for. I’ve had some pretty bad things happen in the last year. I think if I had known ahead of time that bad things were on the horizon, the angst before the bad events would have been increased but that would have had no effect on what it took to actually deal with the events.

Foreshadowing in real life would have just increased my suffering. Just like foreshadowing in books causes me suffering. And since I’ve got enough suffering in my real life, I refuse to let this cheap literary trick keep me on the hook. It’s lazy and unrealistic. And there are plenty of books out there that can entertain me without it.