And, tbh, I have not read a king book since. I read half the series before I found out that he had not finished it. Almost ten years later, he up and finishes it. Too late, already lost me for a lifetime. Since then I found authors that do not screw the readers over like that.This is REALLY bad when I start an incomplete series. Usually, I’ll restart the entire thing before starting the book that just was released. It is one reason that I rarely start an incomplete set of books. Then there is the fact that the first time I did that, the damn author never finished the series.
I am still waiting for the third Ring of Charon book to come out and I finished that series like 5 years ago. I will likely never read that author again though, nothing make me angrier than having an author churn out another 5 or 10 books before finishing the set they started.
Stephen King did that, wrote other books before he finished his long series, The Dark Tower. Someone sent him a postcard with a picture of a teddy bear and wrote, "Finish the Dark Tower or the bear dies!" And he loved it; he kept it posted by his computer till he finished the series. He has a GREAT way of dealing with this: he finished the series (and the last book is good, I mean to listen to it for a reread) and now he has started to interpolate new books INSIDE the series. And why not? That's quite a good idea. Then you don't leave readers hanging, and you can still use your ideas for later volumes.
I too have to start a whole series over when a new volume comes out, and this is getting unmanageble. Tad Williams is particularly challenging that way -- long volumes AND long series. I never had an author die on me so far, but I live in terror of it -- I was so worried Dorothy Dunnett wouldn't finish either of her two great historical novel series, the Crawford of Lymond one or the Niccolo one. Both have a lot of volumes and she was getting older and older.....she did, though. When she finally finished the second series, she was sort of memorialized in a portrait double-page ad in the New Yorker, everyone was so relieved.
He might have ‘fixed’ the series but he left me hanging far too long and, honestly, I have a hundred books plus that I want to read. No reason that I should worry about the loss of one author.
Yes, I can see how a series can get unmanageable if you read a long one over again. I was faced with that prospect in wheel of time but it looks like he just finished the last one. Good thing because I was not sure I wanted to attack it again when the next one comes. I might do so later, after a few years but I would feel forced into it if I waited for the next book and tried to read the series again at that time.
After all, it is just 13 books long and they are so short – only about 400-500 pages each….