When it comes to cheap deaths in any type of medium, I find myself quite educated in the subject. The very first cliché editorial part I uploaded back in the summer of 2016 talked about the staple of most Disney movies; falling off a cliff to your death. I've mentioned multiple times in some shape and form why killing the villain or the main character is a cheap gag to sell your audience. Heck, I have even talked about fake-out deaths in the past, a vile cousin of the cheap death if not done right.  I am pretty experienced in this particular cliché and from my vast experience I can say one thing for certain; boy are they annoying!

  The worst contenders for cheap deaths in literature from experience are the fantasy genre, and to a much larger extent, the horror genre.  For some strange reason, authors love to completely sell out their audiences in horror stories, especially when it comes to killing off a character.  There is the death of Micheal Langdon in the eighth season of the TV show American Horror Story where our main heroine Mallory runs over the apocalyptic trigger with a car multiple times over in the past in a scene straight out of a comedy.  In the film Jaws: The Revenge, the antagonistic shark instead of being taken out by a sudden smart move by police chief Martin Brody is impaled by a ship and for no reason at all explodes into a million bloody chunks.  As great as the book Demonata is, the killing of main character Grubbs Grady's family in the beginning of the novel was a bit of a lost opportunity that was really only saved by great dark tonal direction created by the author Darren Shan. 

  Horror stories are littered to the brim with cheap deaths, becoming an extremely negative staple of the genre that is possibly worse than the modern invention of jump scares.  These cheap deaths make potential audience members see the horror genre as mostly a badly written, cheesy joke that is equal to terrible toilet humor.  They see the genre as nothing more than a way for punk and goth teenagers to get a quick kick of adrenaline and view some messed up gory killings.  Cheap deaths in the horror genre are that terrible, and have badly damaged the reputation of most of the medium.  No Stephen King or Edgar Allen Poe story in the world so far has been able to even slightly fix this debilitating problem, even with their level of polish.

  The only way I can realistically see this tainted staple of the horror genre magically disappear overnight is if it is outright made as an illegal trope for all authors to use.  If they wish to gain any type of notoriety for their work, they have to make all the deaths in their stories have some type of meaning, rather than being one big joke or completely pointless.  They have to earn the audience's dedication,even if it takes multiple drafts and lots of coffee fueled cafe days writing on their computers to do so.  The prize for not using cheap deaths in horror anymore is a captive audience who sees the true poetic symbolism in your story and less people who associate the genre with cheesiness.  Those who do not listen to the new status quo lose the potential attention their story could have had if they did not take the cheap way out for a lot of the major plot points.

  For every single author who pledges to this cause, another horror genre fan is created in the process.  If that is kept in mind all the time, the cheap death trope in the genre could be done away with completely in a couple of years.  The best part about this path is that other types of writers seeing the success of the suddenly fruitful horror genre will improve their writing in the process and do away with the same major problems that held them back.  It could literally in the best case scenario create a new golden age for literature that probably a huge chunk of you readers out there would desire very much. 

  So I ask you very kindly to spread the word about this potential change of direction that could be done.  Make cheap deaths not only in the horror genre taboo, but a huge chunk of the clichés already talked about here on this editorial.  Together, we can create that literary golden age I mentioned earlier, with even more talented writers than before finally entering the medium.  We could have a taste of a beautiful modern interpretation of the horror genre, combining all the best aspects of it.  The public can at last see the horror genre as a respected medium in the same vain as fantasy stories and teenage fiction.