Plot Twists That Cheat the Reader

Here’s a post at Jane Friedman’s blog: No Twists for Twists’ Sake: Earn Your Ending

Imagine you’ve just picked up the latest buzzy thriller, the one that has everyone on social media raving about the “shocking twist.” You start reading, and you’re really into it. It’s a murder mystery with no shortage of suspects—the victim Jane’s cheating husband Hugo, her jealous best friend, her unstable coworker, an obsessive delivery person—and you’re having fun guessing which one is the culprit. You turn to the final page, full of anticipation … only to discover the murderer was the victim’s long-lost twin sister, a character who was never once mentioned in the preceding 300+ pages. What?

I’ve seen this, this exact thing, at least twice. I can’t quite remember where, just what. I mean, in one case, there was a lot of blood at the murder scene, great pools of blood, enough to establish the victim must have died even though there was no body. Then it turned out the identical twin sister … maybe there were actually three identical triplets? … not sure I remember for sure, but I do remember the blood was donated by multiple identical twins in order to fake the murder of one of them.

What book WAS that? Does that sound familiar to anybody? It’s on the tip of my tongue, I swear.

Anyway, I didn’t mind all that much. I knew something was up. Maybe the author signaled the identical twin, though … I think not. But I’m not sure, because obviously my memory is vague about the details.

ANYWAY, is there a word for this — I mean, an unfair twist? Because I think there is, or at least sort of. I think this is adjacent to a false miracle — I mean to deus ex machina / diabolus ex machina. It’s really close to the same thing! Because a deus ex ending comes out of nowhere, and this is a plot twist out of nowhere. The difference is a deus ex ending is a false miracle, while this … what is this? It’s a real plot twist, but it’s unfair. Okay, it’s an unjustified plot twist, and deus ex is an unjustified miracle. That’s why they’re sort of the same thing: they both come at the end of a story (or important scene) and they’re both unjustified.

And they’re both added to the story because the author lacks the judgment to realize the solution is unjustified, or else because the author lacks the creativity to either justify the solution or find a different way to handle the ending.

Anyway, a plot twist that isn’t justified is indeed a problem, sometimes a big problem. The linked post offers ten solutions if an author is struggling to justify the twist at the end, starting with the extremely obvious (scatter relevant details throughout the story so the source of the twist doesn’t come out of nowhere).

A clever suggestion is the addition of what the post calls “interstitial elements,” meaning newspaper clippings or social media posts or other such elements, which might be used to set up the twist. I like that sort of thing, so I think that’s a neat idea.

Other suggestions at the linked post, which is slanted toward mysteries and thrillers, but of course plot twists are a thing for lots of stories in basically every genre.

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