I swear, and I am NOT fucking around this time, the next time I pick up a young adult book and the protagonist owns so much as a gerbil I am putting that bad boy down and finding something else to read! I was minding my own business, reading
The Knife of Never Letting Go
and I just couldn’t put the thing down, partly because it’s a good book but partly because I was living in mortal fear for the poor dog, okay? And YES, of course the dog gets it. Horribly. And I sobbed like a little girl. In fact, I’m crying now just thinking about it.
And don’t be all “yeah, what’s the matter with you, you don’t care about all the moms n’ people they kill in the same books” but that’s the point. The author knows how to get you where you live. They kill the dog because they know it’s going to hurt you more! I mean, for one thing, everybody who has a pet (except maybe people who keep big parrots and Galapagos tortoises) lives with the knowledge all the time that they just don’t last long enough. Plus, it’s likely that you’ve experienced the death of a pet, even the violent death of a pet, more frequently than the death of a human loved one. So that’s why they do it! They do it to get you!
And I don’t mean to say it was cheap - sometimes it is, but in this case it was totally appropriate and fit the story and everything. It was just awful and I don’t want to read that sort of thing anymore.
ETA - to my shock, by the way, The Forest of Hands and Teeth did NOT kill the dog, even though I was waiting for it the whole book. Killed just about everybody else, though.
I am totally with you! But my complaint is about movies. In a movie today, if a dog appears in the first 10 minutes, that dog will be toast before the film is over. This pisses me off SOOOO badly!It’s such a cheap trick. It does NOT tug at my heartstrings because it makes me too mad. I feel like I’m being jerked around and manipulated.
In older movies (I mean classic films from the 40’s and thereabouts), even in a crime movie, a family could just have a dog. Period. And the dog would just be in the background and it would survive the whole movie. Now, the dog is just doomed… kind of like the red-shirted crewmen in the original Star Trek.
I wish there was a list of films where the dog (or horse, or cat, or other animal) dies, like that list of books. Does anyone know if there is one?
I thought girls LIKED IT when the animal dies. Otherwise the animal wouldn’t die in every blasted YA book aimed at young females.
Me: Whatcha reading?
Daughter: Where the Red Fern Grows.
Me: Does the dog die?
Daughter: Probably.
Me: Then why are you reading it?
Daughter: Teacher seems to think it will be good for us.
A female teacher, of course. Guys figured it out what to avoid a long time ago, though we still can’t avoid Ol’ Yeller, one of TWO books or movies where guys are allowed to cry. (The other is Brian’s Song.)
Buttercup, the cat from The Hunger Games, survives. I found myself worrying about that stupid cat all through the books every time something bad happened so I was very pleased he made it to the end.
Really? About 15 years ago, I thought there was a bit of a trend in movies to put an indestructible dog in the middle of a dangerous action sequence. I think Speed 2: Cruise Control and Independence Day had blatant examples of this, though I haven’t seen either recently. When The Lost World: Jurassic Park showed a dog being eaten by a dinosaur, that was a rule-breaking scene. Maybe there were more violent dog deaths in film back then, but I wasn’t see them because I was 10.
Ha, me too. My fiance keeps telling me I should buy doesthedogdie.com and run a website warning people if the dog dies or not. A few days ago I checked it - somebody has already done the same thing!
I wish they would stop assigning this book at school.
When my son was reading this book, I wrestled with telling him outright that the dogs were going to die. I was horribly shocked and somewhat scarred by this book as a young girl. I did finally tell him before he read it for myself. He thanked me. The kid loves dogs like I do (even works with me in rescue) and I didn’t want him to go through what I did.
No More Dead Dogs is a book by Gordon Korman in which the protagonist is supposed to be in a school play based on a book in which…you know what. The protagonist rebels, and he and his friends write a new play.
Literature is not always about fun. Literature is often about truth: it’s a way of saying something about human nature or society that can’t be summed up or packed into an aphorism. Some of those truths are sad.
Books can be more than just entertainment: they can be a source of insight, and that can start at a very young age. Did I enjoy the end of Ol’ Yeller? Not at all. But it gave me wisdom no abstract discussion about right and wrong could have.
Isn’t the title pretty much a giveaway? What could it possibly describe besides something that shows up at a gravesite? I’m pretty sure that when I read it, I knew the ending even before cracking the book open…
There is earned “dog dies” and then there is cheap “dog dies”. Frankly, Ol Yeller is cheap as shit. That is some manipulative, sadistic bullshit in that movie. The whole point of the movie is getting you invested in the dog so of course Travis has to kill it. It isn’t in service of a larger theme or anything - it’s “a movie where the dog dies” and that’s the point. The book I refuse to spoiler in my OP at least wasn’t like that.
