Cliffhangers in Books—Smart Storytelling or Reader Betrayal?

You know the moment.

You’ve been looking forward to this book for weeks. Maybe months. You finally sit down, coffee in hand, ready to devour the book for a few hours. You already love the story. The pacing feels right, and you root for the characters. The climax is epic.

And then it happens.

Right when everything is about to change, the story stops.

To be continued.

For some readers, that line is electric. For others, it feels like a personal offense. Personally, I feel frustrated if the book ends before giving me closure. But I'm old enough to be patient.

Lately, this exact moment has sparked a surprisingly heated debate in the book community: should authors be upfront about cliffhangers? Should they be listed alongside content warnings? Or is that asking too much—maybe even ruining the point?

What sounds like a minor preference has turned into a much bigger conversation about storytelling, reader expectations, and how little patience we seem to have left.

Not All Cliffhangers Are Created Equal

As a writer and a book blogger, I've watched this conversation from both sides , and I think part of the problem is that we're lumping very different endings into the same category.

• There's the hook cliffhanger. The kind that closes one door and cracks open another.

I love writing these. In Forget Me Not, the core arc resolves. Rae survives. She makes it out. The danger she's been running from is over, and that matters. The reader earned that resolution. But in the final scene, she meets the girl from her visions   who promptly blows magical dust in her face.

End scene.

That's not a betrayal. That's an invitation to read the sequel, Blue Shadow Prophecy. But I gave readers closure first.

This kind of ending is intentional. Respectful, even. It acknowledges the journey you’ve just taken while inviting you forward. Personally, I love this small cliffhangers because they give me a taste of what's to come.

Then there’s the other kind.

• The book that stops mid-crisis. Mid-decision. Sometimes mid-scene. No resolution, no pause to breathe—just a hard cut that feels less like suspense and more like a sales tactic. When readers say they feel tricked, this is usually what they’re reacting to.

Same word. Very different experiences.

Have We Lost Our Tolerance for Waiting?

One argument that keeps resurfacing online is that readers today are simply less willing to sit with uncertainty.

And honestly? There’s some truth there.

We can get anything we want right away. Entire series drop at once on streaming platforms. Answers are a search away. If something doesn’t resolve quickly, frustration sets in. Suspense, once a feature, is now often framed as a flaw.

But storytelling didn’t always work this way. Long waits used to be part of the experience. Readers speculated. Argued. Imagined possibilities. That space between installments wasn’t empty—it was alive.

So when readers ask for cliffhangers to be flagged, is that entitlement? Or is it just a realistic response to overstimulation and limited emotional bandwidth?

Probably a bit of both.

Do Cliffhangers Belong in Content Warnings?

This is where things get thorny.

Content warnings were designed for genuinely distressing material—violence, abuse, trauma. Adding “cliffhanger” to that list feels, to some, like it cheapens their purpose. A narrative device isn’t the same as a trigger.

Certain genres operate on unspoken agreements. Romance readers, for example, expect emotional resolution. If a book is part of a duet and ends without one, that expectation matters.

Is it unreasonable to want clarity before investing time and money? Or does that level of disclosure defang the story before it has a chance to work?

Somewhere Between Surprise and Transparency

If every creative choice needs a warning label, something gets lost. Reading should still be allowed to surprise us. Even frustrate us a little. Some of the most memorable books are the ones that made us furious enough to care.

That said, honesty goes a long way.

Simply labeling a book as Book One of a Duet or First in a Trilogy sets expectations without giving anything away. It tells readers they’re stepping into a larger arc, not a neatly wrapped standalone.

Readers, too, might benefit from reclaiming a bit of that old discomfort—the space where anticipation lives.

So Where Do You Stand?

Do you peek at the last page just to be safe?

Or do you live for that sharp intake of breath when the story cuts to black?

And if you’re a writer—does flagging a cliffhanger feel like basic courtesy, or like someone asking you to explain the punchline before you tell the joke?

There’s no single right answer. But the fact that we’re arguing about it at all says something important: stories still matter enough to make us feel cheated, thrilled, or completely undone.

And maybe that’s the point.