Recently, I have found myself wanting to read books that make me feel something. If something awful happens to your protagonist character who you've spent time apparently making me feel something for, and then this thing happens and I feel nothing...
Yes, we have a problem.
Some weeks back I discovered J.R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood series. Basically, each "brother" has a book, but the stories don't stay neatly within the covers, they branch out into other books, which also has the advantage of making you immediately want the next book. In the second book Lover Eternal, we meet Zsadist. Well, I met Zsadist. Being that I was reading from the Library, I managed to pick up book 2 first. Now, it is not Zsadist's novel, it's actually Rhage and Mary's novel, and Zsadist is portrayed as being dangerous and unstable. This did not stop J.R. Ward from making him a sympathetic character. So throughout all the novels until we finally see him clearly in his own novel, I've felt bad for him, liked him, hoped good things would happen to him - and when they did I was really really happy. This happened with several other characters too.
When really bad things happen to your character, I need to feel sad. If it doesn't even make me feel a little bit sympathetic, there is a disconnect and that is a problem. When bad things were happening to Zsadist, I found myself tearing up and crying because I really really wanted everything to work out for him. This was interspersed with wanting to beat (up) his love interest for not noticing what her actions were doing.
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