I'm really pissed.
A good book can do that you.
It tricks you into believing strange lands and stranger people, and just when you start getting comfortable with, and even fond of, the characters... well, then in come the villains and ensnare the hero away. Not only do they torture him, but they also screw up all the fancy plans and strategies he'd made and I'd spent so many hours reading. Why couldn't the asses just take the money, or kill each other, or die of spontaneous combustion or bad luck or whatever. But no, coz apparently there's a law similar to gravity that operates in novels to keep the hero downtrodden right till the last page.

So it is that I'm gnashing my teeth while my dashing man has been caught in the wily snares of lots and lots of women. I hope the beating he's getting from them will make him stop trusting them FINALLY, coz frankly, I can't bear the pain they give him at every corner. Last night I could barely sleep wondering who on Earth will rescue him.

The only comfort is that he is the hero of the novel after all, so I can reasonably hope that he will be alive and well in the end (and cornered by the right women too).

The bad news is that what I'm reading is the 6th book in a series of 13 novels of which only 12 have been written. So just in case the author Robert Jordan fails to write the final installment of The Wheel Of Time series, there is a good chance that I'll be stuck waiting for a rescue mission.

Now if I were to write a book, it would be different.
The hero would be a mish-mash of South Indian actors - Rajnikanth, Vijaykanth, etc. Therefore he would be capable of doing anything, by which I mean ANYTHING. (giving electric shocks to electric shocks, biting bullets fired at him, surviving 10-storey falls, etc etc) So no way that even an army of a thousand Indian soldiers, or even two Australian cricket teams, could bind and take him away.

And to bolster my readers confidence further, my villains would be a cross between Kevin Spacey in The Superman Returns and Dr Evil in Austin Powers - you know, sufficiently senile to be their own enemies, and so obviously evil that the hero has no chance of confusing them with the good guys.

And even then, to ensure that no readers of mine get nervous palpitations regarding my hero's future, I will kill them on the first page.

Horrible goons, namely Mister Sinister and Blood-thirsty-Vampireman are dead, my story would begin. For the rest I can harp on about the delicious food he is eating and the enthralling parties he's going to. I know it sounds like a Page 3 story, but you know what, those things make money. Besides, wouldn't it be a nice change for your wife/husband to not find you clutching a book at 12 pm at night, desperately trying to read fast to the point where the hero finally manages to aim at the right head in a bullet fight?