At least as far as the main hero and heroine are concerned. I won’t offer the same promise for a secondary character, even one who might have a love story within the book. Although if I do screw a secondary character, most likely they’ll show up in their own book and get the love that’s perfect for them. Because you know the one I got rid of just wasn’t.
I’ve been reading romances since high school back in the 70's. Sure most of them brought the hero and heroine together for the rest of their lives, but I remember One. The One Book that changed my reading habits forever.
Like most readers who loved to devour Barbra Cartland books (I’ve read a lot of them) we knew what we wanted. A hero to die for who was broody, commanding, loving and faithful. A hero you and the heroine fell in love with. To say that Cartland’s hundreds of books were exactly the same where only the names and somewhat the faces changed, you’d be absolutely right. But they gave me an escape, a fantasy to fall into that took me away from my day to day high school drudgery. I hated high school. I was fat, my glasses were frequently referred to as pop bottle bottoms and I was even worse at being social than I am now.
I also found my imagination often took the books far beyond the book's end and I’d expand them. Eventually, I had my own story I wanted to tell. A Gothic romance complete with a governess and dark brooding hero. My parents were great about encouraging me to make my story come to life. But I digress.
Besides Cartland, I read shelves of Gothic, historical and pirate romances. I read everything I could get my hands on called romance never once thinking one day an author would betray me.
One book, I don’t remember either book or title, had me swept along on the trials and tribulations of the hero and heroine. Again, I’m not even sure which sub-genre the book was, but what I do remember to this day: The freaking hero died. Honestly, I was devastated. From that day forward, if I’m reading a romance, not a mystery or a fantasy or some other genre, but a romance, I look at the last line of the book to be sure no one ever dies again.
So can a romance have an ending where the hero and heroine part ways either by choice or by death? Unequivocally, no! Can a love story have an ending where someone leaves or dies? Yes. Romeo and Juliet, Love Story and the movie City of Angels come to mind.
For me, Love Story and City of Angels are one-time-only-never-to-be-visited-again and damn-I’m-sorry-I-went-there-in-the-first-place experiences.
Especially City of Angels. To say I felt like I’d just wasted 114 minutes of my life is an understatement. At the end all I could say was: “What the hell was the point of leaving Heaven?”
In closing, is this new trend bad? No, not at all, if the story needs to have someone die or go away, then by all means write the book that works best for the characters, but please, just don’t call it a romance. Put it under general fiction. Better yet, call the thing a tragedy. Or maybe be kind, and do what Shakespeare did, just spell it out in the prologue:
“A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,”
Happy reading!
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