It’s Tomato Week on Tiny Toon Adventures Short Story Showcase! This series focuses on stories that are both well-written and do something that I find interesting from a technical perspective.
I don’t normally condone Tomato Surprises, or surprising a reader with something that the characters knew all along. They show up in a lot of hack sci-fi from the glory days of the pulps, and in enough mystery stories that the Detection Club Rules ban them in no less than three separate ways. (1, 7, and 8, for those keeping score.) I usually find Tomato Surprises to be cheap ways to get a reaction from the reader, and now that I’m a writer, I realize how incredibly lazy they often are, too.
There are exceptions to every rule of fiction, of course. If you want to see a Tomato Surprise done well, I commend to your attention “I, Boy,” by Stone Showers and published in the Stupefying Stories Showcase.* It begins as a story about friendship, loss, and the commodification of life in an age when children can be built (and purchased) like iPhones, but ends with a powerful meditation on mortality and life. In this case, I think the key to the effectiveness of the Tomato Surprise is that, instead of underwhelming as the Big Reveal of the story like such surprises often do, here it’s only a setup for the POV character taking a sledgehammer to the fourth wall and the natural detachment of the reader. Check it out! I think you’ll be genuinely surprised.
*Full disclosure: I’ve also been published there.