< They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot

They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot/Literature

  • Ramsey Campbell's The Overnight is a horror novel set at a big-box bookstore in England. Over half of the story is spent setting up the seething tensions and hatred just below the surface in the relationships among the staff. It's hinted that the bookstore is built on ground where a bizarre number of battles and acts of violence have occurred, and that the place has a palpable effect on people's emotional states. The store manager becomes an increasingly unsympathetic, almost grotesque and frightening character, and it's revealed that he's been sleeping in his office for weeks, thus being constantly exposed to the negative influence of the place. At the story's climax, the whole staff is locked in the bookstore overnight to do an inventory. Instead of the obvious payoff to all this buildup, the psychological horror of ordinary people trapped and turning on each other... some slimy gray monsters come and kill everyone, and the creepy manager turns out to actually be the protagonist, as he is the only character left alive. It's like the author got bored with the story he was writing and decided to tack on the ending of a totally different, much less interesting story to wrap it up.
  • Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables. So many elements could have been fantastic stories (ghost story, mystery, romance, just about any genre, really) and what did it deliver? A whole lot of hot air and a stubborn refusal to say anything bad about the closest thing to a villain the author bothered to introduce. The pain finally ending in the two old people running away from their problems. And it's a classic. Ugh.
  • One can't help wondering why so much emphasis was placed on the letters "needing" to be delivered in Going Postal, and the Post Office being a "tomb of living words", when that was going to be "resolved" by the place going up in flames around the three-quarter mark.
    • For Character Development. Why would Moist want to keep the Post Office going when he's no longer an avatar? It's Personal plus Not So Different gives Moist motivation and fuels real growth.
    • In Discworld, words have power, and a lot of words in one small space makes L-space and results in the words becoming sentient. The letters were alive, and desperately wanted to be delivered - it was their purpose in life. When the place burned down, they effectively died. Discworld physics can be hard to understand if you haven't read the whole series - it's quite complex and comes out in little bits over all the novels.
  • Much of the Everworld series, but particularly the last two books, which just seemed rushed due to cancellation.
  • Not a whole lot of people have read CS Lewis' Space Trilogy, and even fewer are familiar with his unfinished work The Dark Tower, a truly awesome and ahead-of-its-time Speculative Fiction novel that features interdimensional travel, mythological references, a fully-developed Alternate Universe more in the vein of Riven than Narnia, Hive Minds, and Time Travel, that foreshadows That Hideous Strength. Instead, he wrote Perelandra, which, although quite good and much more within the same mythology as Out of the Silent Planet, should never have prevented him from finishing The Dark Tower.
    • Just a note: some have noted how different The Dark Tower is from Lewis' usual writing and questioned its authenticity. Nothing is known for sure, but if it isn't his that would probably explain this trope.
    • Does Author Existence Failure really count for this trope? I'm sure Lewis would have gotten around to finishing The Dark Tower eventually if he'd had time...
  • Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a fantastic book (if completely different from what you expect from the various adaptations), but one thing bothered me: the Monster demands that Victor make him a bride, and he refuses, imagining a whole race of these creatures living in some remote corner of the world, and not wanting to unleash that on the world. Now that could have been great. Apparently, James Whale also thought of that, as per the movie Bride of Frankenstein.
  • Thanks partially to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke has become infamous for advancing hard science at the expense of good storytelling, and his Time Odyssey series, coauthored with Stephen Baxter, again seems to run right into the classification punch. The first book, Time's Eye, is an imaginative story where people and places from many different times are transplanted onto a "patchwork Earth", and Alexander the Great's troops, aided by some modern technology, square off against Genghis Khan's. The book ends with Alexander and his allies building railroads and starting to recivilize their new world. The reader can't wait to read what happens next, but in the very next book, boom; the whole thing was just a monument to Earth made by aliens who nonetheless wanted to destroy it, and the plot shifts to the much less interesting attempts of our world to stave off the impending destruction.
  • Fluke or I Know Why The Winged Whale Sings by Christopher Moore starts off pretty well. The main character, a marine biologist named Nathan Quinn, sees the words "Bite Me" written on the tail of a whale and decides to investigate. Nathan works with a quirky and interesting supporting cast of fellow marine biologists. There is romantic tension between the introverted Jonas and the more extroverted new girl. There is a rivalry between the biologists and the evil corporation that are hinted to be doing something evil. And there is a nice environmentalism theme too. Then, halfway through the book, Nathan is kidnapped and spends the rest of the novel walking around a giant Cosmic Horror of sorts while the supporting cast sits on their hands and try to figure out where he is, and the environmentalism theme and initial mystery are ruined because they are tied to the Cosmic Horror, resulting in a Broken Aesop. What could have been an interesting mystery about whales is ruined halfway through.
  • In Animorphs, Book 41 has Jake sent into an Alternate Universe where the Yeerks have conquered Earth and enslaved the Andalites - Tobias, not trapped as an Andalite, leads a terrorist organization consisting of a battle-hardened Cassie and a crippled Rachel, Visser Three is the Emperor of the Yeerks, Marco is a Visser in charge of Earth, and Ax is also a Visser who rules the Andalite home world. The dystopian future causes Jake to undergo a lot of hardships as he witnesses almost every shade of grey morality in the spectrum...and it's all a dream caused by some unnamed entity who deems that humans "require further study." This entity is never identified, at all.
    • For that matter, most books in the series keep the status quo of teenagers fighting the Yeerks alone, so quite a few plot points are wasted - the Yeerk resistance movement, the Iskoort, normal humans on a chat room who know about Yeerks, the Chee ship buried underwater. Not to mention many Yeerk plots that they try once, the Animorphs stop them, and they never try again, like infesting the President, retooling satallites to broadcast Kandrona rays, etc.
  • The Grey Griffins series. All manner of plot devices are raised, and not used. The main character is a wealthy 11 year old boy, Max, who has, among other things, a bodyguard who teaches him how to fight... which he never does in the three books currently available. He and his friends spend a lot of time playing some card game that's supposed to teach them the rules of the magical world that's crossing over with reality, but none of what they "learn" in their card game is ever used. Minor plot devices come and go as they please, too. Max learns how to make portals appear out of the air, and uses that ability like twice, then never again.
  • Northern Lights (also known as "The Golden Compass") ends with the revelation that Lord Asriel is a Magnificent Bastard intent on destroying Dust, and quite willing to kill his own daughter's best friend to do so. That sets up a great plot hook: Lyra will have to contend with Heaven, Mrs. Coulter, and her beloved father to preserve Dust and the Multiverse. Mrs. Coulter gets a Heel Face Turn, and Asriel never intended to destroy Dust in the first place; he wanted to go after the Authority. Lyra doesn't end up having to contend with all that much to preserve Dust. (Turns out all she had to do was fall in love.)
    • Not forgetting the third book which has a large proportion of the sentient beings from the entire multiverse lining up for war against all the other sentient beings led by God, or the Metatron in the name of God following a coup several mellenia ago. Do we get to see the epic clash of arms that would put even norse myth to shame? Nope, two kids run across the battleground, dodge some cavalry, see an old friend and promptly leave for a different universe. There were enough POV characters involved in the battle, couldn't we have stuck with one of them for a bit?
  • Let's not forget Smeyer's The Host. A story about alien parasites that take over the world for our own good and a parasite whose human host isn't complying or backing down, who then finds out that the last person this happened to actually killed another person, which is against the parasite's nature, and is fundamentally altered.
    • Plus, there's two narrators essentially, and you could get to see humans from an alien's point of view.
    • Not to mention Burns, who was only introduced in the epilogue and is given no time to develop. Then there was that soul family with the human child, Wanderer's past lives...the list goes on.
  • Andrew Vachss. The premise is always so promising, but it's ALWAYS abandoned just as things are getting good. No matter how fascinating the story, Vachss will pull the rug out from under it, and there will always be pedophilia at the bottom of it. The man's done amazingly admirable work in his life, but his fiction's a mite frustrating.
    • Terminal. A former high-ranking member of a white supremacist group is dying, and the only whisper of a hint of a chance for survival is a treatment being developed in Switzerland. What we get is a story about a group blackmailing pedophiles into giving them the cash for the treatment.
    • Choice of Evil features a serial killer who targets only gay-bashers- oh no, he's a former kidnapped who wants to assume the position of best assassin ever.
    • Hard Candy is supposedly about rescuing a girl from a cult, but damned if that plot took more than twenty pages of the total book.
    • Blue Belle features the main character being hired to stop a group of men who are killing local prostitutes. Only problem is, they're protected by a martial arts master named Mortay, supposedly one of the best in the city. This becomes a major plot point, given that the main character's best friend is also a gifted martial artist. Mortay (who appears on about four pages of the book, towards the end) threatens his family to goad him into a fight. The fight never happens because the main character kills him with a grenade.
  • George R.R. Martin's books are full of these. Every time it seems that the current plotline is about to reach some sort of climax or crowning moment of awesome, the main character that that plot depends upon dies and it all falls apart. The only reason he can get away with this is that a new plot is then picked up in a matter of chapters, and the new plot is just as good as the last one, so you forgive him. Still, some people get rather annoyed at the fact that while a lot goes on, nothing ever gets resolved. Given the plot is following a spectacularly brutal and prolonged civil war involving multiple factions, it is not surprising various plots get curtailed as they try to grow in that environment.
    • Interestingly enough, Martin himself has admitted that many of these "build-and-release" moments of aborted plot are deliberate, to parallel the fact that, in the real world, events rarely end in a narratively satisfying fashion with everything tied up with a neat little bow. As the original inspiration for the series was the Wars of the Roses, this is not entirely surprising.
  • The last book in the Ender's Game series had the protagonists discovering the origin of descolada virus, the source of most of the conflict for the past three books. It seems like that was a Sequel Hook, but Orson Scott Card never did anything with it.
    • Also, in Ender's Shadow, we see that Bean was the one who chose the students in the Dragon army in Battle School. While drafting the army, Bean had three spots left. He decided on a girl name Wu, who was a brilliant tactical mind and a fantastic shot; when put up for promotion to toon leader, however, she instantly requested transfer and refused to play until then. This seemed like a really interesting character, especially in the Battle School where the number of girls can be counted on one hand (Petra is the only one in the early books in Battle School, Virlomi is introduced later as a graduate), and we could've gotten a subplot about what exactly Wu's problem with promotion to a leadership position was, and how it could've been helped by Ender. Instead, not only is that not explored, there is absolute zero mention of Wu ever again, and furthermore, it appears that the army is 100% male (they never refer to a girl in Dragon army, ever). So what could've been another strong female character with a fairly interesting backstory just ended up being a total throwaway line.
  • Very late in James P. Hogan's Paths to Otherwhere, the Chinese philosopher discovers that when the characters transmit their minds between their bodies and the body of one of their parallel timeline counterparts, they don't just overwrite the target's mind for the duration of their stay, but in fact both minds will eventually merge into a unified consciousness in both directions if the link is maintained long enough. After this, the book hints that not only is this possible during a transmission, but that if you indulge in inter-timeline travel enough and are very focused, you can train your mind to feel through the separation between timelines even when the linking machine is off, to communicate with multiple alternate timeline counterparts, possibly merging an infinite number of minds together across time. Instead of investigating the ramifications of this, upon discovering a paradise timeline, the characters all agree to abandon their bodies and their troubled home timeline alike to live there.
    • At least, some implications of Flash Sideways as merging of fully compatible minds were picked up and explored by Max Frei. Twice - in Labyrinths of Echo (where Murakoks are pre-networked) and in spin-off series (when the Shadow of Sir Max learns to do it).
  • H. G. Wells' The Food of the Gods (not to be confused with the So Bad It's Good movie), straddling his classic science-fiction period and the Author Tract style of his later works. The first half of the novel deals with a growth compound creating oversized, mutated horrors, and the scientists trying to stamp out a whole range of altered ecosystems that have begun spreading across England. The second half opens promisingly enough, beginning twenty years later in a world where siren towers warn the public of approaching swarms and special quick-response forces are fighting a steadily losing war against the new order. The book suddenly veers away from that premise, though, in favor of a progress vs. luddites allegory so paper-thin that it doesn't even bother giving the giant-sized Canon Sue protagonists individual names, until the story completely gives way to an Author Filibuster non-ending.
  • William Goldman's Boys and Girls Together follows a group of young people who, after a long series of individual stories, finally meet each other and end up writing/directing/producing a play. Throughout most of the novel, it seems that the writer character, who bases his script on personal experience, is going to have to pay for something he did to his sister as a teenager (which is exactly what he wrote his play about). As the grand finale approaches and things start going seriously wrong, the play ends up losing its main actor just before opening night. You probably anticipated a beautifully bittersweet ending in which the writer character would be forced to take his main character's place in the play and physically re-live his painful childhood memories in front of a live audience. Instead? The play is cancelled, no one learns anything at all, and the real shocker finale of the book is that some minor character was gay all along and ends up dominating the writer character.
  • John Ringo's The Last Centurion is supposed to focus on the actions of a company of American soldiers that was left behind in Iraq due to a bureaucratic mix-up when the rest of the army pulled out during a mini-ice age/killer flu pandemic. Said company and their charismatic leader (the titular Last Centurion) have to fight/talk their way across a depopulated and hellish middle east in order to get home. Roughly 1/3rd of the book focuses on them, the rest being filled with author tracts against Global Warming, Organic farming and liberalism in general.
  • The Anita Blake series has a whole other world with supernatural creatures fighting for civil rights, the conflict between the various sub-cultures (especially considering their more fluid concept of sexuality), and the heroine's struggle to blend her vodoo/Hispanic and her Christian/white heritage. Instead, it's just look at me I'm Slutty Sue.
  • Noir by K. W. Jeter is a horrifingly bad book Doorstopper Author Tract that starts out and somehow concludes with at least a couple of legitimately interesting concepts. The main character has implants that "rewrite" his entire world as a Black and White Raymond Chandler-esque Film Noir world, which would honestly be pretty fucking Crazy Awesome. Too bad Jeter tried to write the entire novel in that style -- and failed miserably. Megacorps rule his dystopian, Cyberpunk Crapsack World -- nothing new there -- but the amusing/interesting part being that if you die in too much debt, it's worth the cost to reanimate you until you can pay off your outstanding credit balance. This fact is only really leveraged in the conclusion of the book. (Don't worry, I'm not spoiling anything, you don't want to read the book anyway, these are the only interesting parts.) The main character goes deep into debt to disentangle an innocent bystander who inadvertantly got involved in his mess. When he is killed by the Big Bad during his attempt at concluding his case, he is reanimated in short order because of his astronomical debt, much to the surprise of the story's antagonist. It's too bad the rest of the book is complete and utter tripe.
  • The Death of Grass by John Christopher. A very interesting apocalypse plot about all Earth's grasses dying, but after an interesting beginning the whole thing turned into survivalist horror and the plot might as well have been zombies for all the difference it makes.
  • In Empire From the Ashes, the galaxy is periodically purged of intelligent life by mysterios invaders known as the Achuultani. In the second book, their latest genocidal wave is defeated and their homeworld (and the evil AI enslaving them) is identified. Humanity never does get around to advancing on the Achuultani homeworld...
    • The text points out that defeating the entire Achuultani race is going to be a multi-generational project, steps one and two of which are 'Finish salvaging as much Fourth Empire remnant tech as possible and building up our forces to sufficient size' and 'Breed and raise enough free Achuultani to have the occupation troops/missionaries sufficient unto actually converting the rest of their brainwashed hordes so that you don't have to kill them all'. Both jobs are hinted at needing a couple of centuries to complete, so, yes, the main plot effectively ends as soon as the Achuultani incursion into the galactic arm is defeated and the Fifth Empire is founded.
  • In Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger series, the lead character is a dabbling musician transported to a magical world. But the thing is, the wizard who called for him was trying to get an engineer. The possible awesomeness of that is only matched for the fact that it would by any means turn out as a horrible case of Mary Sue.
    • Rick Cook fulfils this wasted potential in his Wiz Biz novels, featuring a computer programmer summoned to a world of magic.
  • A fairly old one, but jarring nonetheless. Let's set up a premise, shall we? A prominent mobster whose famed rise to power altered a nation is caught by the police for tax evasion. Before they can capture him, however, he is shot by an unknown assailant who leaves him in a three day long fever state in which he lays down a trail of poetic, rambling, possibly insane last words. He also leaves behind a massive hidden treasure of mob money, and a trail of secrets surrounding it, which is never found. This all really happened. Now, this was adopted by famed avant-garde author William S. Burroughs into a novel idea, written as a screenplay. Awesome, right? Wrong. The book is instead a long, bizarre, completely fictional screenplay that delves into a fake Captain Ersatz's history, explores subplots based around Burroughs' own fictional characters, and gives the main character his own set of fake, much less interesting, last words.
  • Stephen King's The Talisman gets hit with this. About a boy, Jack Swayer, who has to journey across the country to retrieve an artifact to save his mother, who is the counterpart to the queen of a fantasy alternate world. This alternate world is introduced, and much of the book is about Jack learning how to use his powers to travel there. You'd think Jack would spend most of his time in the magical fantasy world, which is tied to the fate of the queen and his mother, right? Wrong. Jack spends the majority of the book hitchhiking across rural America and ending up in an Orphanage of Fear. He ends up spending a bit of time in the fantasy world towards the end.. and spends it riding a train through a desert. Weee..
    • Given that this is King we're talking about here, his magical fantasy world may very well be powered by Lovecraftian horrors. And that train? May very well be Blaine The Mono.
  • Robert Charles Wilson's Darwinia is set on an Earth where, in 1912, huge chunks of Europe, Asia and Africa and all their inhabitants vanished. In their stead is a land of roughly similar landscape, but from an entirely alien world with vastly different biology from an entirely different path of evolution. The story follows the protagonist a few years later in an "Exploring Darkest Africa" sort of story as he travels to the center of this new Europe. During this fascinating exploration of an entire alien world, he finds out the entire thing is part of a Simulation Of Everything That Ever Was at the End Of Time that is being attacked by "viruses" who have corrupted the storage of past-Earth. It's far, far from a bad book, in fact it was nominated for the Hugo for the year it was published, but the sudden - and literal - Deus Ex Machina and completely dropping every aspect of the alien world from the story from that point on is a bit of a disappointment. Further exploring either concept on its own would have made a great novel.
  • In Ramona Forever, Mr. Quimby gets a job offer to teach in a one-room schoolhouse in Oregon, and it raises the question of whether the family will have to move. Ramona immediately considers the implications of this, as it would result in her leaving her friends, her school, and even Picky-Picky’s grave behind, but would also enable her father to become a teacher. This never happens, as later in the book, he instead becomes a store manager for the grocery store company he works for, noting with hidden disappointment that people can’t always do what they want.
  • Arguably, Twilight suffers from this. For one thing, if we ignore the fact that Meyer's vampires turn into a giant disco ball in the sun, they are pretty badass. Nigh indestructible, ripping victims' throats out (no neat puncture marks in the neck there!), a newly-turned vampire can kill an entire village in his/her rampages, and turning into one is three days of pure pain that literally makes you beg for death. Many of her background characters, especially the vampires from around the world she introduced in Breaking Dawn, seem very interesting and complex. In fact, the two least interesting characters in the whole series are probably Bella and Edward. It had the potential to be a much better story than it actually is.
    • Breaking Dawn sets us up for an amazing fight scene with all these incredibly powerful werewolves and vampires, and then just as things are getting started, they all decide to resolve everything peacefully. A bit disappointing, really.
    • And then there's the way that the plot and characterisations bend over backwards so the female lead always gets the best result while still having every character simpering and fawning at her feet? There were so many good plots wasted where characters, setting or backstory could have been developed by the end of book 1 that some readers have maintained that the wasted opportunities are worse than the bad writing and Purple Prose.
    • Not to mention virtually all of the other Cullen back stories - Rosalie went on a rampage to gain revenge against the men who raped and murdered her, basically Kill Bill with vampires. Jasper was involved in a Civil-war era vampire turf war. Carlisle was a vampire hunter who was turned and had to maintain his humanity in 17th century England. Alice's story was basically Twilight with a more compelling setting, a tragic end, and a hero and heroine who don't make us want to shudder and roll our eyes simultaneously. Even Edward's background before meeting Bella, in which he was basically a vampire Batman, is a thousand times more compelling than the story we actually got.
  • So, so, so many ways with Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows. We could have had an epic story featuring all the main, secondary, and peripheral characters fighting Voldemort in a pre-Halloween 1981 environment, with much character focus and intrigue, while Harry, Ron, and Hermione dug away in private at their particular mystery — the logical conclusion to the formula of the other six books. Instead, we got the trio tramping around aimlessly in the middle of the forest with zero insight, depth or development for any character other than Ron and Dumbledore, and listening to (rather than seeing or being involved in) long descriptions of events and horror stories about Nazi Germany-like conditions that, while appropriately chilling, ultimately had no bearing on the plot. More a case of displacing something good and plot-relevant with something equally good but tangential than screwing up a concept, but a waste nonetheless.
      • The "1981" comment most likely refers to conditions of the world: Dark times, with nobody able to trust anyone as Voldemort terrorizes the wizarding world with no end or savior in sight.
    • The final battle between Harry and Voldemort. What could have been and amazing confrontation between both of the most powerful wizards at the moment, we got an overly long "The Reason You Suck" Speech, and just the death of on the most powerful villains ever in just a blink. And then there's the aftermath (just two or three pages).
      • Harry's final battle with Voldemort probably couldn't have gone any other way. In the sixth book, we just saw the only wizard that was ever able to stand up to him equally get killed off, and that Harry just couldn't fill his shoes. Besides, as has been said elsewhere, Rowling had been setting up how Harry would win since the first book, and the ending becomes obvious in hindsight.
        • Approximately three hojillion fanfic authors have found other ways to write the final battle. Admittedly, many of them would not work (Sturgeon's Law), but that still leaves more than a few that would have. Just off the top of my head at random, Harry could have used his mental connection with Voldemort to fight the dude in a Battle In The Center of the Mind, where Voldemort's greater experience with magic would have been countered by Harry having far stronger willpower and conviction. (Voldemort is, ultimately, a coward. Harry, on the other hand, is almost suicidally determined.)
          • To answer the obvious objection, remember that it isn't until the last book that Harry's mental connection with Voldemort is established as Harry being a horcrux, so if we're going to be changing the ending we can easily change that too without contradicting any earlier books.
    • Voldemort has this is well, besides his desire for immortality, we never really see any depth to him, just being something of a Card-Carrying Villain. He is the most feared wizard ever, and people fear to say his name, but outside leading a group of supremacists, we really don't see why this is so.
      • Particularly given that his immediate predecessor as a Dark Lord, Gellert Grindelwald, is off-handedly mentioned as having been the secret Nazi mastermind of a secret occult World War II, happening behind the scenes of the real one! How do you get more fearsome than that just by being a local terrorist?
    • Let's not start with the Epilogue. Instead, Draco. There were plenty of chances he could've done a Heel Face Turn and aided Harry and co, maybe even having a Redemption Equals Death. Instead he slinks away from battle. Of course, let's not forget how epic it would've been if all of Slytherin (or at least the majority) decided to stand with Harry and the school at that moment.
  • The Snow by Adam Roberts has multiple examples of this- it starts off as a disaster story, then it's a psychological drama about isolation, then it turns into political satire, before rounding off all the loose ends with the Deus Ex Machina of saying that space aliens did it.
  • Philip K. Dick once wrote a short story about a woman who is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis out in the far reaches of space, and how her neighbour is drawn into her futile attempts to fight the disease. It was a brilliant plot, but it only had one problem: it was about 1 chapter long.
  • Maximum Ride lost all plot continuity from the Final Warning onwards.
  • Raven's nuclear Dead-Man Switch in Snow Crash. To get to The Raft, he has to take it off so he can kayak. In other words, when it is time for him to fight, it is not there to add to the drama, making it useless.
  • Two of the Goosebumps books, The Abominable Snowman Of Pasadena and Vampire Breath started out pretty well for this series. The former started out as a not-at-all horror-like book, and more of an adventure style novel, but was pretty straightforward and made sense. Then it hit a ridiculous Gainax Ending, where throwing a snowball from the arctic inexplicably turned a Pasadena suburb in summer into ice. The snowman escapes and is never mentioned again, so they bury the snow in the backyard where nobody will ever find it. Until two very minor characters that were only mentioned a couple times beforehand dig them up and throw them at each other. The end. The latter starts off as a surprisingly good and kinda creepy story about two kids who end up in the past in a vampire's castle. It's good until the very end, where they find a bottle of random juice called "Werewolf Sweat," which turns one of them into a werewolf, a weird ending that seemed tacked on to make sure the story wasn't of good quality throughout.
  • Let's think about the premise of the Israeli book "To Know a Woman" by Amos Oz. After his wife dies in a terrible accident, Mossad agent Yoav Raviv decides to retire (against the will of his superiors) in order to spend the rest of his days living a peaceful life in a new house by the see, tending to his Ill Girl daughter. But many years ago, while on a mission, Yoav's emotions led him to make a mistake... a mistake that comes back to haunt him when his superiors demand that he go on One Last Job in order to fix the matter once and for all. Sounds like the beginning of an awesome spy-thriller? Yoav refuses his superior's demand, and indeed does live the rest of his life in peace. The rest of the book is a hair-pullingly boring account of his day-to-day life and his encounters with some nice neighbors. Seriously!
  • Theatre Illuminata. Premise: a teenaged girl lives in an enormous magical theater where the characters from every play ever written enact their plays over and over. You've got Ophelia wandering around trying to drown herself, the fairies from A Midsummer Night's Dream attacking the refreshment tables and absolute insanity going on backstage. There's a director, a producer, and a costume-maker. There's a props room with pretty much everything in the entire universe. The sets are godlike visions of glory and paint. And in the midst of all this, Ariel decides he wants to break out and be free by destroying the "Book of the Theater" that keeps everyone bound to its pages. Fantastic...except that literally nothing comes of the whole setup but a really, really typical, annoyingly-written YA Love Triangle.
  • Sisterhood series by Fern Michaels: This is a fantasy-like series with adventure and romance tossed in it. The first 7 books are about the protagonists getting Revenge and justice for the wrongs that have been heaped on them. The other 14 books are about the protagonists fighting against injustice done to others and terrorism. However, the series falls victim to this trope. Lethal Justice has Alexis Thorne contemplating how one day she take on her real name Sara Whittier again when she is ready. That never happens. Free Fall has Yoko Akia saying that one day she will go and live in Japan where her grandparents live. That never happens. Harry Wong is so powerful, and yet he is considered the second best martial artist in the world. The identity of the number one martial artist in the world is never stated and this character never makes an appearance. Harry trains to be number one in Home Free, but in the end, he decides to give up on it so he can focus on his wife Yoko and their baby Lily Wong. Game Over has the Vigilantes and the Big Five join up with Henry "Hank" Jellicoe's company Global Securities, and it's indicated that they'll get to do what they've been doing, but on a global scale! Cross Roads ends up revealing that they were essentially put in a big Gilded Cage, and that Jellicoe is a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing. In short, the series has some interesting ideas that never actually get to go anywhere!
  • Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy could have been a very interesting book were it not a purely anti-Japanese/South-East Asia Author Tract. There are so many possible themes here. The dangers of over-reliance on a purely electronic infrastructure. Japan's relation to the rest of the world and the way it handles its warrior culture with it's purely defensive military. The tensions that are still felt between Japan and the Empire's former conquests. The Japanese economy's reliance on foreign investment and export. The interplay between the American and Japanese governments and the impact the proliferation of nuclear weapons has on the region. As it stands, the book would have completely faded into history were it not for the ending and it's similarity to that one September morning.
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