Foreshadowing

What a strange topic for a guy who hasn’t blogged in a while. I hate foreshadowing. Yes, I know it’s a legitimate technique for the fiction writer. I’m currently reading Armadale by Wilkie Collins. A long time ago I read The Moonstone and The Woman in White and I thought, I really like this guy’s writing. So every once in a while I pick up a novel by him. Armadale is a very long book with interesting characters. Two principal characters come from the same stock, although they don’t know it. And things are going along fairly swimmingly until this:

“With trifling incidents, in which not even Midwinter’s nervous watchfulness could see anything to distrust, it was still to proceed, until the night came ---- a night which one at least one of the two companions was destined to remember to the end of his life.”

Well! You just know that something bad is going to happen. Whether to Allan Armadale or to Ozias Midwinter, you don’t know. Then you must read one, page after page, waiting for the shoe to drop. Wilkie Collins has me in the palm of his hand, and I just hate that.