August 03rd, 2026

 “Vengeance is Mine,” Sayeth the Hack? Some Thoughts on Revenge                                              as a Plot Device

Last month I was reading this book on horror films. I suppose I should take historian Paul Fussel’s advice and say “movies” instead of “films,” since he claimed (probably rightly) that it sounds affected when Americans say “film.”
Anyway, one of the chapters in the book was devoted to horror anthology movies. These typically feature some kind of frame narrative—either a party host telling chilling tales or someone discovering an old musty book in a haunted house—that leads to the telling of three or four tales. Despite having heard of “the Rule of Three,” in fiction, many of these anthologies contain four stories. Five actually, if you count the frame narrative, which many times ends with one of the monsters described in the stories breaking free of narrative containment to menace the storyteller and his audience.
Every once in a while you will get that hoariest of framing devices: several campers sitting around a blazing fire in the middle of the woods, trying to scare the wits out of each other.
The author of this book, like a lot of people, considers “Creepshow” to be the gold standard of these collections. That makes sense, as the pedigree of the creators—Stephen King and George A. Romero—is so damn high, and the two exhibit a lively chemistry when their respective sensibilities mesh.
There are other collections that are more creative, more experimental, and some with entirely open-ended or ambiguous endings as well. But this writer was an unabashedly avowed “meat and potatoes” kind of guy, and he liked his horror vignettes not only to stay true to form, but to stick to formula. And his formula was basically this:

1. Some shitheel behaves in a terrible way toward someone decent who doesn’t deserve the mistreatment.
2. The shitheel crosses the line with their victim, appearing to permanently vanquish them, either humiliating them so badly they flee, or flat-out killing them and getting away with it.
3. The supposedly vanquished victim returns—or their ghost returns, or something—and the shitheel gets their comeuppance, usually in a satisfyingly ironic manner.

Sometimes, even in such patly formulaic tales, there is a bit of ambivalence. In the second of the four stories in “Creepshow,” for instance, a rich shitheel (played with menace by an against-type Leslie Nielsen) tortures and kills his wife and her lover, who then come back from the dead to kill him. Sure, torturing someone automatically qualifies the torturer as a shitheel, but cheating isn’t exactly a nice thing to do, either.
Regardless, I respected this author’s unqualified preference for this simple, straightforward style of storytelling. It’s not exactly the “Poetics” of Aristotele or the four part Kishōtenketsu of traditional Japanese narratives, but it obviously gets the job done for him and a lot of other people. Those E.C. Comics-inspired anthologies are still getting cranked out, both in print and on the big screen (or at least on streaming services) and demand isn’t likely to die anytime soon.
Still, there are those who find revenge a hackneyed plot. To give you an example, a few weeks ago I was getting ready to submit a short story to a magazine. It’s always a good idea to read their submission guidelines beforehand, not just for the technicals, but because sometimes they include lists of what they don’t want to see. These lists usually come about after the publishers—or their poor slush pile screeners—see too much of one thing and get sick of it. So sick of it do they get, in fact, that they give up on seeking out a novel variation on that old song and simply tell contestants to stop singing it. The list I read included everything from “pandemic-based tales” (understandable) to anything with vampires, werewolves, or zombies. Also, included on the list, were revenge tales, especially ones in which the revenge is far out of proportion to the original offense that precipitated it.
We all, of course, have a right to like whatever kind of stories we like, and it doesn’t require a great defense or apologia to back our preferences. Still, if I could, I would like to arrange a debate—or at least a friendly exchange of letters on their aesthetic theories—between the author of that book on horror films and that publisher. It would be fun, or at least intellectually edifying, to watch the pro and anti-revenge factions duke it out with words.
As for me, where do I stand on revenge as a plot device in fiction? I suppose I could do a survey of my body of work and see how often I used it, though so much of my old writing is shitty and unreadable that I’m not sure I would survive that research project.
Still, I probably stand where I’ve always stood on using any kind of plot device. “The dance,” as my old writing partner Adam Howe liked to put it, “is in the doing.” I don’t mind hearing an old song sung as long as singer brings new life or conviction to it, or at least novel choices in terms of phrasing and emphasis.
And of course, a dose of irony or a nifty bit of unexpected symmetry at the end can really make or break the whole story. That said, there are those who also think that the twist ending—sometimes called the “O. Henry ending” (based on the writer who perfected it) is also a bit hackneyed as well.
I will add, as a final thought, that you can really piss readers off by denying them revenge to which they feel emotionally entitled. You can call it catharsis or the primal urge or a desire to reestablish karmic balance in the universe, but it all comes down to the same thing:
People like to see someone who’s got it coming get their comeuppance. Failing to do this causes a kind of “narrative blue balls,” in the reader who feels they’ve earned the release of pent-up frustrations. To deny them this is to violate that “silent contract” between reader and writer that some argue is sacred. The great Ian McGuire did something like this in his follow-up novel to the masterful “The North Water”—subverting the revenge after seeming to build up to it—and many readers could not forgive him.
Having the aggrieved party get revenge only to discover it doesn’t provide the hoped-for satisfaction is sometimes effective, too. This is what happens in the Hitchcockian and underrated film, “Blue Ruin,” in which a man sets out to kill the person who murdered his parents twenty years prior. It’s only after he’s enacted his plan and is well down the path of vendetta that he discovers things are not as they seem.
That “things are not what they seem,” is not only the oldest plot, but probably, as noir writer Jim Thompson once said, the only real game in town. Thus it would do no good for a publisher to caution writers against submitting stories based around this concept, since pretty much every story has this at its core.