A murder, a memory, a mysterious letter. Do prologues earn their page count, or are they just a trust exercise?
Every trending thriller this year opens the same way: a cold open, italicized, dated fifteen years before chapter one, ending on a line designed to make you flip forward looking for answers. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it’s a promise the next three hundred pages don’t cash.
Mom is firmly anti-prologue on principle. If the story needs it, she argues, put it in the story. Daughter will defend a good prologue to the death, as long as it’s doing something other than being ominous for its own sake.
We went looking for the line between a prologue that earns its keep and one that’s just cosplaying as foreshadowing. There is a line. Most books walk right past it.