The Book Club

Written in a stream-of-consciousness style and comprised of some unrelated short-stories to set the tone.

Multi-generational story with intersecting characters who have gathered together over the common interest of searching for the lost ending to an unremarkable book. All copies of the author's one novel are missing the same crucial final pages and the small clues that the group has have come at a price. Death and destruction has haunted every one of them and, even though they've turned their lives upside down for a quest that seems unending, they remain committed to their task. They will find the ending to this book and in-so-doing, may solve a decades-old crime and find some peace for themselves as well.

Story is ongoing...or is it?

An excerpt from Short-story #6:

For those that read all the way to the end, the story left them unsatisfied. No. It left them angry. Because they hadn't read to the end. They hadn't found that happy ending on that last page. They hadn't found a sad ending. A tragic ending. They hadn't found any ending at all. What they'd found was a sentence that carried onto a page that had been ripped out. Worse than any cliffhanger ending to a TV series or an unfinished trilogy, the story just ended in an ellipsis disguised as a set of dramatic words. And, what was more, the author had specifically designed the story to conclude on that final page. After pages and pages, some three-hundred and twenty-seven of them with multiple arcs and angles buried in conflated language, the book's reader found the page missing. Not misprinted, not fallen due to decay, but purposely, maliciously, hideously ripped out.