The Story Ends There

It’s not that I don’t like sequels–some of them are wonderful, in films and in books. But let’s face it, you have to disturb your characters from wherever you left them at the end of the last piece, and throw trouble at them once more, in a way that fits those characters and their world, in order to have any sort of story. That’s why producing a sequel can be difficult, and disappointing.

But it’s not just that–after all, it’s far from impossible to inject tension into characters’ lives. No, to me it’s a matter of sequels tying things up too neatly. After I finished Turnback Ridge, with my characters (spoiler alert) reunited and safe once more, I was asked over and over if I was going to write a sequel. After all, I hadn’t resolved the question of where my main character Nash’s wife was, and if she was ever going to make it back to him and their sons. People wanted to know–well, what happened to her?

Honestly, I never wanted to resolve the mystery of what happened to Maria. The novel points to the very definite possibility that she was snatched by the ICE-like henchmen roaming Anchorage, and ended up in a detention facility. But I didn’t want to follow her story, in part because for the families of immigrants who’ve been disappeared, there might not be resolution, or not for a long time. The uncertainty is the point. Tying up too many loose ends, filling in too many holes, makes it all too easy to set a piece of fiction down and not have to think about it again, and that I hoped to avoid.

I have another reason, too: I wrote Turnback Ridge during the first Trump administration. Now, during the second, and with the situation for immigrants (and for so much else) many orders of magnitude worse, writing about it in a futuristic, slightly exaggerated setting no longer seems feasible. Reality has outstripped the nightmare scenario I conjured. For instance, there are no Native Alaskans in Turnback Ridge, in part because they’re not immigrants. It didn’t occur to me that tribal members would be snatched by authorities and be accused of being in the US illegally–it turns out, I was wrong about that.

For now, I’m not imagining the future. Even our day-to-day lives seem to be swinging this way and that way, blown about by the imposition of tariffs, by an attack on a foreign country, by ever-changing policies. For immigrants, there are sudden rule changes, and attempts to alter what seemed to be bedrock certainties, such as that children born in the US are US citizens. There is a looming sense that immigrants are no longer welcome here, and that somehow or rather, this government is determined to be rid of us.

I don’t know where and how all of this will end–no one does. And it’s that very uncertainty that, unsettling though it is, is so very valuable in fiction, because it is so true to our lives.