Peg Herring, Mystery Author

I'm not a big reader of science fiction , but I love it when it's well done. (Michael Crichton comes to mind.) Good sci-fi writers explore interesting social questions while constructing cool plots about things that haven't happened...yet. My complaint with SF is that all too often the story ends with "and now we must kill the aliens before they kill us." The last few chapters are the all out battle for the survival of our species, with lots of things blowing up and gallons of green blood spilt. That's not my thing. In the most recent example I read, the story began well, with questions about how time travel would actually work and what the resulting physical and mental problems might be, but it ended up with monsters pouring out of the portal and lots of shooting. We started with questions and ended with an arcade game. SF isn't the only predictable genre, which is why genre fiction has a bad name with literary folks. Who hasn't started a romance

Tired of what, you might ask? (Even if you didn't ask, I'm going to tell you.) I'm tired of "must-read" books that depress the heck out of me. Families that are breaking apart. Teenagers who are going through hell. People in crisis who don't deal with it well. I know books have to have such characters to create tension, but in many recent bestsellers these are the protagonists; the people I'm supposed to keep reading on for. Last night I started one of the current must-reads. It's really well-written, and the hook was excellent. I read on, chapter after chapter. Things got worse for the main character, and as a result, he got worse, acting out, making his family suffer, cutting ties with those who might have helped him get through it. As page after page of humiliation and despair crawled by, I began to feel that I was wallowing in misery, the main character's and that of everyone around him. Now, I worked with teenagers for decades, and I