Review: Too Much of a Surprise
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 17, 2014
Contrary to what people might think, it's easy to write a surprise ending for a book... just have someone do something completely unexpected, the more unexpected, the bigger the surprise. Unfortunately, it's not that easy to write an effective surprise ending because, in addition to being fooled, readers must feel the ending flows logically from what's gone on before, even if they didn't see it coming.Aaron Patterson's thriller novelette, "The Craigslist Killer," is a generally effective story that's unfortunately dragged down, in the last couple of pages by an ending that doesn't make sense in the context of the story. The book concerns a group of college age buddies who come up with a challenge bet for one of them. They dare a smooth operator named Bill that he can't meet a total stranger on Craigslist and get two dates with her within thirty days. Somehow, the bet goes from $10 to $50,000 in a matter of minutes, a sum Bill doesn't have; in fact, he doesn't even have a car at the moment. I'm not sure what type of college students bet that kind of money, no matter how drunk they are, but, the bet drives the plot.By naming his story "The Craigslist Killer" instead of something more innocuous, author Patterson starts playing a mind game from this moment on with the reader, who knows based on that title that something bad is going to happen as a result of one of Bill's attempted hookups. And Bill does hookup rather easily and quickly, with a good looking girl named Amy. For anyone thinking of dating someone on Craigslist, the story provides some good, entertaining do's and don'ts. What is more likely to keep reader interest however, is the inevitable following of the details of the encounter between Bill and Amy so that the reader can try to spot signs of something bad coming. Patterson is able to build suspense fairly well through use of the title gimmick.I don't want to spoil anything, but, as the story title suggests, there's more involved here than a big bet about a date. Some very unexpected things occur, and the story actually has two successive surprise endings. The first probably won't come as too much of a surprise for those who read the story carefully, but it is satisfying. If Patterson had ended the story at that point, I'd have given it a higher rating. Unfortunately, he tries to "top" himself with a second, completely surprising ending in a two-page epilogue. It's this second ending that will have readers scratching their heads trying to figure out where it came from. And, since the final ending doesn't really add anything to the story, it merely diminishes the effectiveness of everything Patterson did before that.Patterson knows how to write a solid thriller. Although the story is less than 40 pages long, the author provides all the plot details needed to construct a scenario that feels realistic. Even the character development, especially that of Bill and Amy, is more fully established than in a lot of books ten times as long. If Patterson had chosen to end the story before that unfortunate epilogue, I would have enjoyed it considerably more. As it is, the ending breaks the mood solely for the sake of "surprise." However, while the surprise is certainly unexpected, it's also anticlimactic. As a result, a killer of a story feels a lot less lethal.