PROLOGUE
Before We Begin Our Journey Together
It was a dark and stormy night.
The kind of dark and stormy night that was, if one were being precise about it, very dark. And also quite stormy. Rain lashed the windows of the library like the cold fingers of a reader who had not yet learned to appreciate the full beauty of what lay before them. Thunder rumbled in the distance, as thunder so often does, as if the very heavens themselves were trying to tell us something.
Something important.
Something about prologues.
Since the dawn of time, or at least since someone first picked up a quill and thought, “you know what, I’ve got some things to say before I say the things I’m going to say,” humanity has wrestled with one of its greatest questions. A question as old as the hills, as deep as the ocean, as vast as the sky on a clear day when you can see quite far: are prologues really part of the book?
Dear reader, I’m so glad you asked.
Pull up a chair. No, the comfortable one. You’re going to want to be sitting down for this. What you are about to read will challenge everything you thought you knew. It will make you laugh. It will make you cry. It will make you see the world through new eyes, specifically the eyes of someone who reads the whole book, like a normal person with basic respect for the written word.
This is a love letter to the pages people skip and a declaration of war on the people who skip them. This is, in the most profound sense of the word, a journey.
A journey that begins, fittingly enough, right here.
In the prologue.
Which you are reading.
Well done.
In the words of the great William Shakespeare, who knew a thing or two about storytelling and also about tights: “What’s past is prologue.” Think about that. Really think about it. We’ll be here all day.
The whole book is the book. All of it.
Somewhere, right now, someone is cracking open a novel, flicking past the first few pages with the casual confidence of a person who skips the safety warnings on their new medicine for stupidity. They land on Chapter One, satisfied. They believe they have started the book. They have not.
The prologue-skippers are among us. They are organised. They are vocal. And they are, without qualification, wrong.
Here is the thing about words printed inside of a book: they are part of the book. This is not a philosophical position. It is not a matter of interpretation. A prologue does not exist in a separate dimension, hovering just outside the narrative like an optional side quest. An author placed it there, on those pages, before the story began, because they made a deliberate creative decision to do so. The word “optional” does not enter into it.
And yet.
Online, you will find readers who treat the prologue like the terms and conditions on a software update. A quick scroll, a dismissive tap, gone. One reader, cheerfully confessing this habit on Goodreads, described prologues as “boring stuff before the good stuff even starts.” Another admitted they skip prologues in horror novels because they find them unnecessary, just a little tease of what’s coming.
Over on a writing advice blog, the author encourages readers to skip prologues and, with remarkable confidence, tells writers they should probably be doing the same. The reasoning, essentially, is that since many readers skip prologues, writers shouldn’t bother with them. That is the logic of a restaurant removing coffee-flavoured ice cream from the menu because some some serioulsy deranged British authors don’t like it.
What these readers are really saying is this: the author’s structural choices are subordinate to my reading preferences. Which is quite a take. Quite a bold, quite a spectacularly self-important take.
Let me give you a counter-argument.
Stephen King’s 1975 vampire novel does something structurally audacious that most people who skipped the prologue simply won’t understand. The novel opens not at the beginning of the story, but after it is already over. The prologue opens with Ben Mears and Mark Petrie arriving in a small village in Mexico after fleeing the vampire-laden ‘Salem’s Lot, as the two attempt to heal, still traumatised by what happened.
The main story, all those hundreds of pages of creeping dread and small-town horror, is essentially a flashback. It exists to answer the question raised on the very first pages: how did these two men end up here, hollowed out and running? If you skipped the prologue, that entire narrative architecture collapses. You are reading the answer to a question you never knew was asked.
The prologue takes place shortly after Mark and Ben escape, revealing that the two flew to a seaside location in Mexico in order to recover and plan out their next steps. And then the epilogue, which the prologue-skippers presumably also vaulted over, delivers the kicker: the epilogue has the two returning to the town a year later, intending to renew the battle, with Ben setting the town on fire to flush out the remaining vampires.
That is not an afterthought. That is the entire thematic resolution of a novel about whether good people, broken people, can choose to go back and fight. The 2024 Max adaptation cut both the prologue and the epilogue, and critics noted the absence immediately. The movie felt unresolved because it was. The book, with its full framing device intact, is not. Funny, that.
Or consider Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, still one of the most atmospherically horror novels ever written. The prologue and epilogue, deliberately vague and concerning a man and a little girl, are of an illuminating piece, and readers should pay particular attention to them.
On a first read, they seem disconnected. Odd. Almost accidental. They are not. They are a trap. The full weight of those opening pages lands only after you have finished the novel, when you understand who the man and the little girl actually are and what has been set in motion between them. Straub is playing a long game. Skip the prologue, and you won’t even know you’ve been played. You’ll just think the ending was tidy. It isn’t.
You could skip those pages. In the same way you could walk out of a haunted house after the first room and say you had the full experience.
The argument that a prologue feels “outside” the story is, at least, an honest one. It is wrong, but it is honest. The label itself seems to be the culprit. Having content labelled as “prologue” or “epilogue” makes it seem as though the writing held within is not really part of the book. This is a typography problem masquerading as a literary principle.
Some writers have been advised to simply rename their prologues “Chapter One” to stop readers skipping them. Read that again. The solution to the prologue-skipping problem is to trick readers into reading it by disguising it. Fine, I’ll just call it Chapter One and be done with it, as one exasperated writer put it on a writing forum. Rather than readers expanding their capacity, the suggestion is for authors to shrink their ambition.
No.
The epilogue suffers equally. Readers who race through a novel, hit the last chapter, feel the glow of completion, and then physically close the book before reading the epilogue are robbing themselves of the closure the author specifically designed. Stephen King’s Misery makes this point without mercy. The epilogue, titled “GODDESS,” exists for one reason: to show that surviving Annie Wilkes was not, in any meaningful sense, a rescue.
When Paul sees Annie emerge with an axe from behind the couch in his apartment, he imagines her beheading him, thinking to himself, “Goddess,” before he dies in his hallucination. Annie Wilkes was in her grave. But trauma transcends certain knowledge and death. She rested there uneasily. Skip that epilogue and the novel becomes a thriller about a man who gets away. Read it, and it becomes something far darker: a novel about a man who will never, entirely, get away. Those are two completely different books. The epilogue is what makes Misery a horror novel in the truest sense, because the horror doesn’t end when the threat is eliminated.
Which brings me to a genuine grievance, and I am going to take a moment here because this has been bothering me for years.
Horror epilogues, when they exist at all, tend to do one of two things. They hint that the monster survived. Or they offer a soft-focus flash-forward of the survivors looking vaguely okay. Neither is good enough. What I want, what the genre so rarely delivers, is an epilogue that takes the real-world consequences of a horror novel seriously.
Think about it properly for a moment. Genuinely think about it.
Your characters have just survived something catastrophic. There are bodies. Possibly dozens of them. In a haunted house, in a small town, in a hotel that is now a smouldering ruin in the Colorado mountains. The police are going to have questions. The police are going to have a lot of questions. And the answer, “an evil supernatural entity did it,” is not going to hold up particularly well in a formal interview.
What does Ben Mears actually tell the authorities about what went down in Salem’s Lot. He and a twelve-year-old boy have just set fire to an entire town. There is a dead vampire in a boarding house basement. There are staked corpses in cellars across the county. At some point, someone official is going to turn up and want a statement. A full statement. Under caution.
The Losers Club, in It, spend the epilogue reflecting on love and fear and the strange residue of shared trauma. Fine. Admirable, even. But at some point between 1985 and the end of the novel, seven adults returned to a small Maine town and several of them ended up dead. Eddie Kaspbrak died in a sewer. Stan Uris killed himself. Henry Bowers, who had already been blamed for multiple murders decades earlier, turned up dead. The town of Derry partially collapsed into a sinkhole.
Someone filed a report about all of this. Prior to Mike’s phone calls, all of the Losers had completely forgotten each other and the trauma of their childhood, burying the horror of their encounters with It, which is a lovely piece of supernatural convenience, but the coroner’s office in Penobscot County does not have the same luxury of forgetting.
This is the epilogue I want. Not the monster’s hand reaching up from the grave. Not the survivors holding hands on a sunny hillside. I want the scene three weeks later, when someone in a beige office asks the protagonist to walk them through, one more time, what exactly happened to all those people and why there is a hole where a town used to be.
That is where the real horror lives. In the paperwork.
There is a school of thought, propagated mainly on writing advice blogs and Reddit threads, that prologues are a sign of weak craft. That a good writer should be able to weave all context into the narrative itself. “Any element in your prologue that advances the story should be written into the story,” goes this argument, delivered with the solemn authority of someone who has read a great deal about writing and rather less of the actual stuff.
Right. Sure. Let’s go with that.
By this logic, the solution to a bad starter or dessert is to ban chefs? The solution to a poorly constructed bridge is to stop building bridges. Bad prologues exist, yes. Lazy prologues exist. So do bad chapter ones, bad second acts, catastrophic third acts, and endings so botched they retroactively ruin everything that preceded them.
We do not address these failures by declaring the entire structural device illegitimate. We respond by writing better. The fact that some writers use a prologue as a dumping ground for exposition that they couldn’t be bothered to weave organically into the narrative is a problem with those writers. It is not a problem with the prologue. This is not a complicated distinction, and yet here we are.
The blog post writers and Reddit rabble-rousers pushing this position would presumably also like us to know that semicolons are pretentious, adverbs are lazy, and anything over four hundred pages needs cutting. There is an entire cottage industry built on reducing fiction to a set of rules simple enough to be posted as a listicle, and the prologue-is-weakness argument fits neatly into that tradition of confident, reductive, thoroughly missable advice.
But here is the thing that really gets my goat every time I encounter this particular strain of criticism. It doesn’t read like it was written by someone who loves books. It reads like it was written by someone who loves having opinions about books, which is an entirely different activity and one that requires considerably less actual reading. You know the type, still wearing John Lennon Glasses, the perfectly ruffled hair, probably a green used German Army Jacket, and a journal filled with self-loathing responses to Smiths songs. The sort of person with a Robert Lindsey poster on their wall thinking it was Che Guevara. (Sorry, I got flashbacks to someone I went to University with called Simon, why are they always called Simon?)
There is a joylessness to it. A kind of energy directed at storytelling itself, as though fiction is a problem to be solved rather than an experience to be had. Anyone who has ever lost themselves completely in a novel, who has read the last page and then just sat there for a moment in the silence of it, does not come away from that experience wanting to write a listicle about structural redundancy. They come away wanting to read another one.
These critics remind me of the person at a dinner party who doesn’t eat, just talks loudly about food. They have opinions on technique, on craft, on what lazy writers do and what disciplined ones don’t. What they seem conspicuously short of is any visible sign that they actually enjoy the thing they are critiquing. You can feel it in the prose. The pleasure is absent. What remains is the performance of authority, which is not the same thing at all.
And that performance, it turns out, has found its perfect home.
Because this is not really about prologues. It was never really about prologues. It is about the attention economy, and the discovery, sometime in the mid-2010s, that the most reliable way to generate engagement online is not to celebrate something but to condemn it. The algorithm does not reward nuance. It does not reward the measured appreciation of a well-used literary device. It rewards outrage, certainty, and the clean dopamine hit of a hot take delivered with conviction.
“Prologues are a sign of weak craft” gets clicked, shared, debated, and quote-posted in furious disagreement. “Prologues can be brilliant when handled well. Here are some examples:” gets eleven likes and a polite nod from someone’s book club. And yes I see 100% the irony of this article, but I’m nothing if not an ironic in short shorts.
So the clickbait articles multiply. The ragebait BookTok videos accumulate views. The “unpopular opinion” Goodreads posts become entire personalities. Influencers who have built followings on bad reading takes are not going to pivot to quiet, thoughtful appreciation of narrative structure, because quiet, thoughtful appreciation doesn’t pay.
The angry algorithm feeds on controversy, and controversy is far easier to manufacture around what is wrong with books than what is right with them. The prologue-skippers, the epilogue-dismissers, the self-styled reading rebels announcing their habits online as though they constitute a brave intellectual stance, are not literary critics. They are content. They are feeding a machine that needs fresh grievances the way a fire needs oxygen. And don’t get me started on the DNF listing smart arses who seem to gleefully bathe in the bubbles of bad takes.
What makes it particularly tedious is that with so many of these people, the boos come well before the books. The douchebag identity is assembled first; the literary opinions are retrofitted to support it. They are not people who read prologues, reflect carefully, and conclude they added little. They are people who decided that skipping prologues was the kind of thing their online persona would do, and then went looking for the argument to justify it.
The hot take is the product. The reading habit is just the branding. When someone announces to their followers that they never read prologues, the point is not the prologue. The point is the announcement. The point is the identity. Look at me, the unsentimental reader, too savvy and too efficient for the author’s indulgences. Look at me not being taken in.
Shakespeare, for what it is worth, disagreed with all of it. “What’s past is prologue.” The line is from The Tempest, and it means that everything preceding a moment sets the conditions for what follows. It is the most famous endorsement of the device ever written, produced by a man with a reasonable track record in the storytelling department. The readers currently flicking past their book’s opening pages might want to sit with that for a moment. Take their time. Really let it land. Then, perhaps, close their laptop and open the actual book. From the beginning, this time.
Reading is an act of respect for the work. Not every book earns that respect, granted, but the decision to open one is an implicit agreement to meet the author where they are, on the terms they set, in the structure they chose. Prologues and epilogues are not decorative. They are not padding, filler, or the literary equivalent of small talk before the real conversation starts. They are where the story starts and ends. And if you don’t like that you can as my gran used to say “away and boil yuir heid in a bucket of warm piss”
You paid for the whole thing.
Read. The whole. Thing.
EPILOGUE
After Our Journey: Reflections on What We Have Learned and Where We Go From Here, Together, As One
And so, dear reader, we come to the end.
Or do we?
No. We do. It’s the epilogue. This is genuinely the end.
But what an end it has been. What a road we have travelled, you and I, side by side, through the verdant fields of literary argument, across the treacherous mountains of online discourse, and into the sunlit valley of Knowing Better. You came to this article one person. You leave it another. Changed. Irrevocably and profoundly changed, in the deep and fundamental way that only a strongly worded blog post about narrative structure can truly change a person.
When you opened this piece, perhaps you were a prologue-skipper. Perhaps you flicked past opening pages with the casual confidence of someone who had somewhere to be. Perhaps you told yourself it didn’t matter. That you were getting the important bits. That you were, in some ineffable way, reading smarter.
You were not reading smarter.
But that is okay. That is what this journey was for.
Go now. Go forth into a world of whole books, read from the first word to the last, in the order in which they were written, by authors who spent considerable time on those opening and closing pages and would very much like you to read them. Hug your loved ones. Call your mother. And the next time you crack open a novel and see the word “Prologue” at the top of the first page, take a breath, settle in, and read the thing.
You are not too busy.
You are never too busy.
As for me, I will be here. In the epilogue. Waiting for the people who almost closed the article before they got to the end.
I see you.
I always see you.
THE END
(No, there is no post-credits scene. This is a blog post, not a Marvel film. Close the tab. You’re done. Well done. I’m proud of you.)
Jim "The Don" Mcleod has been reading horror for over 35 years, and reviewing horror for over 16 years. When he is not spending his time promoting the horror genre, he is either annoying his family or mucking about with his two dogs Casper and Molly.
