I suspect a lot of people use reading as a quick escape from their lives. This isn’t because their lives are miserable or the like, but often because it gives them a chance to do something new, be someone else, for a short time. As such, we as readers are often attracted to happy endings and the like. Honestly, who wants to read through tens of thousands of words and hundreds of pages only to learn the heroine dies and the hero is left alone and bereft? Yet the unhappy ending can often be a powerful ending, when properly utilized. Just ending a story without wrapping up the loose ends (much as what Falcon Twin did with its story) can result in fans who are ready to track down and inflict bodily harm upon the writer who left them hanging. But a story that ends on a sad note… but which brings closure to its varied plot points… becomes something much greater.

Hopscotch is a tale of love found and lost… of two wayward lovers united for a brief interlude. It’s also the tale of how deception and a failure to tell the truth can sunder love and drive people apart. But mostly it’s about Mike, a young man trying to cope with a failed relationship, and the young woman whom he literally is run down by (fortunately on foot as she rushed from a train). The story follows from Mike’s perspective (and I must admit it would be curious to see the story from the girl’s perspective and thoughts if John Contrad ever revisited the story) as Mike hops through the emotional minefield in which he finds himself. The glimpses of love’s first blush and of the infatuation of just being together was powerfully done, and if the story had just focused on the happier aspects of their relationship it would have been interesting (if saccharine) enough.

It’s the descent into the darkness as the lies and deceptions both Mike and his lover have kept from one another that truly make this story. The comic moves from your traditional love story to something far more tragic, and ends with the two lovers moving their separate ways. It’s even sadder when Mike reveals he still loves her despite the truths she withheld (which in a sense are even harsher truths than his concealing the fact he’d just been dumped by his ex-girlfriend just days before meeting her). I also get the feeling that she loves him as well… and that this love has grown beyond the initial attraction that dragged these two together. She grew to love Mike for who he was, not just how he looked and sounded. Her affair with Mike gained meaning… and in some ways is yet another wound she will carry in her soul. It’s the sadness of Hopscotch’s conclusion that gives it power and makes it well worth reading even now that it has ended.