Desert Places

The edition of Blake Crouch's Desert Places which I got on my kindle has two endings, neither of which is totally satisfactory.  This isn't some sort of meta-fictional game, like Fowles' French Lieutenant's Woman.  Instead, we have the story as published, and Crouch's original idea which all the publishers rejected.

In both cases, we have a seemingly omniscient psychopathic bad guy tormenting protagonist Andrew.  The published version just leaves it at that.  Bad guys are scary, and that's just the way it is.  They can watch your every move, track your private conversations, and survive weather conditions that would kill anyone else.  On the one hand, this is an exciting way to run a story, but as soon as I stopped to think about it, my suspension of disbelief was gone.

The original ending actually has a good explanation for what's going on, but it's so obvious that I figured it out 10 pages in, leaving me a good 90 pages of fairly tedious reading to see if I was right.  Crouch is no Chuck Palahniuk.

I've started the sequel, but I don't see myself finishing it (I've already taken a break to start another book).  It's one thing to have an explicitly supernatural antagonist; it's a whole other thing to have a supposed human who's able to survive being shot and left to die in subzero temperatures more than 10 miles from the nearest habitation.  That's no longer scary, it's just pointless.