Kate asked Anthony Paolucci:

Gabriel Thorne reminds me more of a classic, Brother's Grimm-style fairy tale (which I love). Why did you decide to end the book in such a dark way? Did you debate using an alternative ending?

Anthony Paolucci When I first started writing stories, I lived by the motto "the extreme always makes an impression." It's corny, and it's something I came up with over 20 years ago, but it was my one true writing rule at the time. Stories that end tragically or not how you would like - those are the ones that you remember. The emotional impact can be very real, even with a fictional character. Would anyone remember Titanic the same way if Jack didn't die, and him and Rose lived happily ever after? That's not how real life works. Real life is the little boy who dies of cancer. The house that burns down and displaces an entire family, destroying everything they own. Yes, happy endings are wonderful, but they simply don't have the same impact as darker ones. That being said, I can't just torture and kill characters for the sake of angering readers - a character's pain and/or death needs to have significance, and therein lies the challenge. Can you imagine how boring and predictable Shakespeare's plays would be if everyone got what they wanted in the end? But because the plot went in the direction it did, you felt something more, and that emotional reaction made the characters real, tangible - you felt genuine loss. It humanized the story, and gave the reader something to relate to - resulting in a profound and intimate connection between the author and the reader. I just don't think anyone could say the same if Romeo and Juliet got married, had kids, and died old and peacefully. There is beauty in tragedy, a sad beauty in loss, because it reminds of how precious life really is - in both the real world and the fictional ones. It forces you to reflect on past choices, and consider the direction in which your life is headed. Grief can inspire as well as destroy. But again, it has to be written skillfully, crafted into something substantial, or else you're just a shock-writer. This is my goal in most cases. Not to take away from the happy ending, either. They have their place. But in Gabriel's case, it needed to end the way it did. That was always my intention from the very beginning.

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