Fictional Endings

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I have been reading some of the short fiction of Clark Ashton Smith.  I'm sort of a sucker for early 20th century imaginative fiction inspired by the works of Lord Dunsany.  Oddly specific?  Maybe, but you are likely familiar with more of it than you might suspect *ahem* Lovecraft *cough*. 

Smith was actually a contemporary of Lovecraft and they wrote many letters to each other.  You might think of Smith as Lovecraft in California.  Smith tends more towards what we would recognize as a 'fantasy' fiction line, which makes his Dunsanian influence a little more obvious. 

As with Lovercraft, there are not a lot of victorious protagonists.  A lot of them read like the beginning of just about any fantasy novel, except instead of someone making a mistake and some heroic characters working hard and rising to fight against evil, someone makes a mistake and it ends badly for them more or less immediately.  So much for the hero's journey.

Someone should do a study of possible factors influencing the way imaginative fiction ends.  Do short stories tend to end more negatively than long fiction?  What roles do the development of society, technology and media popularity play?  Has there been a study?  Let me know.
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