Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
[...]Well, I do think that there's still a difference, in the mind of most readers, between slaying of domestic pets as a device [...]
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Anything that stands out as a plot device is poorly done, it doesn't really matter what it is.
In one novel I read (a crime/forensic thing) a burning cat is thrown into the heroine's home. This is, of course, very distressing for all involved - including the reader - but it turns out not to have been the heroine's cat. Yes, it was a plot device (isn't it possible to, retrospectively, identify almost anything in a story as a device?), but not too obviously so. It was all part of the building tensions against our heroine. The reader expected it to be the heroine's cat and actually gains some relief in finding it wasn't so, which gives them some additional affinity with the heroine.
As a writer I look at this with some curiosity. I wonder what the author first saw. Was it really as we saw in the published book, or did it start out as the heroine's cat and was then later changed to soften the impact on the reader. Maybe the additional (clever, I think) emotional twist was always there. ... One of the downsides of writing is spending far to much time thinking about such things.