(Spoiler alert. I am going to kill off some characters today and tell you about it.)

By PJ Parrish

Some of you might know I have a thing for apocalyptic stories. For some odd reason, dystopic fiction really floats my Charon’s Ferry. Give me degraded societies, post-nuclear nilism, and weird games of survival over sunny utopianism any day.

Aside: I am really a nice person. I tend to side with the optimists. You’d even want to sit next to me at a boring wedding.

But this is just my thing. One of my favorite movies is On the Beach, which led me to hunt down a copy of Neil Shute’s excellent source novel. No one dies in On the Beach, but everyone is doomed. The novel quotes these infamous lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.”

I also liked Suzanne Collins’ books and count The Road among my all-time favorite novels. So when we started watching the TV series, The Last Of Us, I was all in for the long haul. The Last Of Us unfolds 20 years after the world is ravaged by a fungal pandemic that transforms humans into aggressive zombies. The hero Joel is a hardened smuggler, haunted by past loss, who is tasked with escorting Ellie, a 14-year-old girl immune to the infection, across the remnants of the US because she might be the key to a cure. They make their grim way from the ruins of Boston to the Montana wastelands, dodging zombies, renegades and what’s left of a foul government force.  Think The Road meets Night of the Living Dead.

It’s really grim, yet strangely life-affirming, focusing on the prickly relationship between Joel and Ellie, and the drama’s main theme of human duality — our equal capacity for love and violence.

But then Joel dies. Not just dies by zombie attack. He is brutally murdered by rogue survivalists. I was crushed. I was so emotionally invested in this character that I almost didn’t want to watch the series anymore. A week later, it still haunts me.

Why kill off a good character? What’s to be gained? In The Road, Cormac McCarthy choses to kill off the father, who is leading his young son through the bleak post-nuclear world. But I sensed it had to end that way. The boy is taken in by a man and woman and the book’s elegiac ending is oddly optimistic:

She [the woman survivor] would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

I felt none of that sense of faith or higher purpose in Joel’s death. I felt only anger at the banal barbarity of it. I’m trying to process this as a writer. Sometimes, good characters have to be sacrificed. I get that. I’ve done it myself.

But killing off a character should always be done with the greatest of care. When done well, it makes us empathize with the extreme emotions characters are feeling. More to the point, it can — should? — provide momentum for the surviving characters. In the case of The Last Of Us, I can see where things are going to go. Joel’s death will spur Ellie to seek vengeance. But somehow it also seems a little cheap, done only by the writers to make me wonder, “What comes next?”

Killing off the good should never be only done as a plot tease. It must have purpose. I’m going to let someone else speak to this. Quoting novelist Karen Outen here, my emphasis in bold:

Killing off a fully realized character tests a story in a way unlike any other. It draws attention to itself, but the writer has to ask: does it draw energy away from or toward the story? Some deaths can render the story superfluous by contrast, or simply suck all the  remaining energy out of a story. At its best, a character’s death should arrest some lines of story movement but create clearer narrative paths—ones of heightened tension—for other parts of the story.

I see death acting as a pinball lever, shooting a story from one path onto another and opening a new world of consequences for the characters and for the story arc. That new thrust can be as exciting for the reader as for the writer, carrying along with it a dizzying array of emotional realities: regret, relief, hubris, grief, joy, fear. The basic question about whether to kill off a character, then, is no different than the question about any narrative choice: does it work? 

Does the death draw energy toward or away from the story? Is the death well earned? Does it propel the story via another character’s arc? Does it work? That’s the bottom line. I am willing to give The Last Of One a little more time to prove to me that it does.

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Postscript: I am on vacation for the next two weeks. In Paris, by the time you read this, taking in the sights, sounds and the insouciant house red. The world spins on. So please talk amongst yourselves and I will catch up soon. Bonne journée!

While thinking about the topic of today’s discussion, I checked my Facebook page (where we all get out writing ideas, right?) and came across a post from Cowboys and Indians Magazine on the 50^th anniversary of Willie Nelson’s The Redhead Stranger album.

Good Lord, I’m getting old.

If you haven’t heard this LP, just think Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.

back in 1975, This concept in country music was a departure from Nashville’s unnecessary symphony orchestration, and Willie wasn’t interested in continuing this new wave of music. He wanted to return to his roots. To do so, he came to Garland, Texas, (where I worked as an educator for 35 years) and recorded this “concept” album in a tiny one-room state of the art recording studio only a block from Garland High School (where I taught from 1985-86, and discovered I had no interest in becoming a vice principal at that level).

This album was based on an entire story revolving around the Red Headed Stranger who lost the love of his life. Conceptionally, the entire soundtrack is about Parson Shay, a flawed man who murders his wife and her lover. Consumed by grief and anger, he becomes a fugitive traveling the west, struggling with the guilt of his actions. Full of rage, he also shoots a saloon girl who he thinks is trying to steal his horse.

The following lyric, “You can’t hang a man for killing a woman, who tries to steal his horse,” is a novel unto itself.

Willie stripped down so much of the instrumentation that it sounds like an old-school band playing in a garage. When he sent the tapes to his record company, they thought it was a bare demo and wanted to add all that crap he hated.

Because he had full creative control, Willie insisted on keeping it simple, and that album is now ranked number 183 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and number one on CMT’s 40 Greatest Albums in Country Music.

Not bad for doing what he wanted without interference from others who tend to follow the current trend.

Bill Witliff wrote that wonderful screenplay for a movie based on the album, but you’ll likely recognize one of his more famous movies, Lonesome Dove. Based on the book by Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove features two tortured souls, August McCrae and Woodrow F. Call. Gus seeks a lost love, while Woodrow refuses to acknowledge that he loved a prostitute and fathered a child he refuses to recognize.

Many authors explore characters grappling with emotional or psychological trauma that manifests in many ways. This turmoil often stems from loss, or a deep sense of inner conflict, either intentionally revealed by the author, or hinted at through the protagonists’ actions and vague references.

My most recent series featuring Tucker Snow examines a Texas Brand Inspector’s life after his wife and baby are killed by an addict, leaving him to raise a teenage daughter alone. He’s far too impulsive and uses his own brother to step over any imaginary line, laying waste to criminals who, in his opinion, just need killing.

An author doesn’t have to tell readers exactly what drives their characters. The story might, and often does, reveal the emotional issues that drive a protagonist with information revealed throughout the novel.

Mickey Spillane created Mike Hammer, who is driven to seek justice, but he’s a pessimistic creature who survived the Japanese Theater in World War II and struggles to find goodness in the country he fought for.

My good friend John Gilstrap’s Jonathan Grave is another character who seeks justice for all, and his ruthless methods fall outside the law to save hostages most agencies can’t, or won’t save. How do we know what drives Jonathan? Read No Mercy where his backstory is revealed. Is Jonathan flawed? You bet he is.

Aren’t we all?

One reviewer said she particularly enjoyed the “subtle flaws in Grave’s character – flaws he understands and even admits to, but doesn’t necessarily try to correct.”

Other authors have created flawed characters.

Lee Child created Jack Reacher. His major flaw is that he won’t walk off from injustice or a fight. He lays waste to criminals, then moves on to do it again. He prefers isolation, has few social skills, and has an impulsive, extremely aggressive nature.

The Searchers, a novel by Alan LeMay became a John Wayne movie. Amos Edwards (Ethan in the movie) is the most troubled and morally complex character I’ve ever read. Due to a warped sense of honor, Amos is obsessed with finding and killing his captive niece because he believes she’s has been corrupted by her Comanche captors.

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl has more than one. “Nick is not the charming hero we’re accustomed to in thrillers; he’s a deeply flawed and morally ambiguous figure whose actions leave us oscillating between sympathy and suspicion,” writes fan Riya Bhorkar. “Amy, on the other hand, is a master manipulator, crafting her own narrative with surgical precision and leaving a trail of devastation in her wake.”

In Shane, Jack Schaefer’s protagonist by the same name is a mysterious drifting gunfighter who hangs up his guns and falls in love with his employer’s wife. He returns to his old ways when her husband is provoked into a gunfight. He kills rancher Luke Fletcher, (Ryker in the movie), reverting to his old self. LeMay skillfully leaves enough crumbs for readers to see he has a number of faults before he rides off, wounded and possibly dying.

So who is your favorite flawed character, and/or have you created such fictional protagonists? And let’s go one step further. Are these these character flaws cut from whole cloth, or do they come from within?