This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt asks reviewers whether we love or hate prologues and epilogues, and why.
When they're part of a book, I've never had any emotional reaction either way. If a book is well written, an opening scene that takes place before the main story is probably well written too, and so is a follow-up scene that takes place after the main story, if there is one. If a book is not well written, those steps outside the main time line are probably not well written either.
Sometimes part of a story does take place outside the main time line. Say the story is about how someone's ancestor buried treasure and left a map, but nobody's ever found the treasure at the spot marked with the X on the map because, in some intervening year, a flood swept the treasure chest out from among the roots of the old tree in the soft sandy soil near the river. The prologue might show how someone else found the treasure chest and made use of the gold and silver. The main story might be about what the characters do, see, learn, while searching for the treasure. Maybe they give up and write the summer off as a learning experience. Maybe they don't find the treasure but they find something else, like a souvenir of the other person who found the treasure, that's become valuable. Whatever. There might even be an epilogue, as well--maybe a character met the woman he was going to marry while he was looking for the treasure. That kind of thing is not usually considered bad writing.
Sometimes self-published writers just throw in prologues and epilogues to meet a length requirement. That kind of thing is bad writing, and it shows; usually the main story in that kind of e-book wasn't very good either. Maybe the story is a biography and the prologue tells how the writer decided to write a biography of that person. Maybe the story is a romance and the prologue tells how one half of the couple broke off a previous relationship...in romance novels the main characters used to be required to be young, with no previous relationships, and now that that rule's relaxed the main characters are still supposed to have made clean breaks from any previous relationships. Or the story has been a wholesome romance with kissing and stepping back, and the epilogue shows us the main couple demonstrating How Babies Are Made. Nobody who already had that information needed that scene.
The prologues and epilogues that bring out strong feeling in reviewers, though, have to be the ones that are marketed on Amazon as books, meant to be trailers or "teases" for another e-book. Those I usually don't like.
They can be done well. A series of full-length novels, volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and maybe more, may have shorter stories as volumes 0.5, 2.5, 5.5 and so on, where the shorter stories are complete stories in their own right. Don't send me what ought to be the first quarter of the book, where the character gets into trouble, and expect that I'll care enough about the character to buy volume 1 where the character finds a solution to the problem set up in volume 0.5. Do feel free to send me the preliminary story where the detective character, as a child, found a missing pet or lost library book, or the romance character, as a teenager, vowed at someone else's wedding "I will never marry someone like him for reasons like hers," or the vampire character became a vampire (or learned that he'd been born one).
I think writers should try to avoid publishing either a prologue or a "sample" section of a novel as blatant bait to get people to buy the whole novel. If the story you send to people doesn't resolve its own problems, how will those readers ever trust that the full-length novel will do that? I don't know anyone who thinks "Oh, I must find out what happens to the character Tracy." Bad writers usually gravitate to genre fiction and the genre tells us what will happen to Tracy. The "buy the full-length novel to find out" treatment leaves us thinking thoughts more like, "I don't need to spend 99 cents to find out how this bozo will prove that the butler, or the token 'conservative' character, or the Jealous Beauty committed the crime. It's only second-rate fiction, so who cares. In fact, even if it's a Western That Breaks The Rules and Tracy is hanged for the crime Stacy committed, that ought to serve Tracy right for being a character in an annoyingly bad book written by an obnoxious person."
"Buy something now" is a very efficient way to remind us that the characters are merely figments of someone's imagination.
The short epilogue that serves as a bridge into a different series, on the other hand, can be done well. We've seen how detective character A solved a series of homicides; maybe we want to see how detective character B does with a series of frauds, and maybe you, the author, feel moved to write a short story in which A nd B work together. That one might be a good story.
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