How To Hold The Readers' Attention

Poul and Karen Anderson, The Dog And The Wolf (London, 1989), I, 1.

How To...

End Volume III with a cataclysmic event: in this case, the flooding of Ys.

Let readers think that Volume IV will begin with the immediate aftermath.

Begin Volume IV with a contemporaneous aspect of the cataclysm.

Near the end of Volume IV, we read Gratillonius' point of view as he tries but fails to rescue his daughter, Dahut, from the Atlantic Ocean as it cascades into Ys. At the very end of that volume, he, without her, has reached the shore and the city is no more.

At the very beginning of Volume IV, The Dog And The Wolf, we read Dahut's point of view of Gratillonius' attempted rescue. In both accounts, he loses his grasp on her arm. But now we are told how she is whirled away by the water and drowned. But The King of Ys is historical fiction with an element of fantasy. After Dahut has breathed water, something else happens:

""She spun down endlessly through a whiteness that keened.

"At the bottom of that throat was not nullity. She came forth into somewhere outside all bounds. Someone waited. Transfiguration began." (p. 24)

This is the beginning of the final volume and not the end of Dahut.