The Perils of a Twist Ending

To be honest, I’m not a fan of twist endings. There are just too many things that can go wrong, like maybe it will be obvious from a mile away, or it’s the same cliché twist found in a hundred other stories, or it just doesn’t add anything to the story and is therefore anti-climactic. Those problems can potentially be avoided if the twist is inspired and clever, but even then there is a big risk: the story itself relies upon the sudden revelation at the end to inform all of the events that have come before, so the only pay off of reading the story is the twist and re-readability is zilch. In short, a good twist ending is hard to pull off and probably not worth it, so I doubt I would ever attempt one myself.

Twist endings and related varieties of dramatic ends were quite a bit more popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries. For example, it was more common to have your protagonist suddenly die or kill themselves in the last few paragraphs, perhaps because of a greater sense that ends really had to be final, whereas contemporary tastes not only find such conclusions melodramatic but are more apt to find satisfaction in stories that continue past the last pages of the manuscript, inviting our imaginations to linger upon them. Twist endings tend to feel as worn-out as last-page-protagonist-suicides, and I am hard-pressed to think of any authors who use them today—though there are probably a few out there.

However, there is a distinguished modern literary award that bears the name of perhaps the greatest twist-ending writer of them all: O. Henry. Because O. Henry incorporated a twist in the ending of basically every story he wrote, one almost wonders if some of the supposed unpredictability of the twist is compromised. Yet, while many people love O. Henry for just this very reason, I think what really makes him worth reading is his use of humor. Fortunately, there is more to his writing than the twist endings, which tend to work rather like the punch lines of jokes, and the characters he brings to life have an unpolished honesty and intimacy evocative of another American Everyman, Mark Twain.

What a fitting choice for America’s Thanksgiving weekend podcast story, when something as down-home and friendly O. Henry makes a proper addition to the comfort food on our tables. Of course, this story also comes with a patented twist ending. Do you think the ending works and adds to the story? Do you love twist endings and think I got it all wrong, or do you agree that such flourishes of the pen are all too fraught with peril?