In another short story I introduce a guy, give some background to explain his mood and then have him kill the protagonist (the story takes place in Heaven - protagonist needs to die). When I showed the story around a couple people were confused/upset that I opened with a character that is never heard from again. My opinion is that the guy served the same purpose a car/plane/train crash or choking on a soup cracker - he just happened to have a name and a motivation.

Thanks.

There are pretty hefty negative consequences in beginning with a character who is never seen or heard from again. For one thing, a character's importance is measured by two factors:
1. How close to the beginning of the story they appear.
2. How much page time they get.

Number 2 is variable. At the end of the book, Al might have only shown up in chapter 1 and so we know he wasn't all that imprtant. But at the end of chapter one Al's been there all along, he showed up early, and frankly, readers are going to assume that he is the most important character in the story. They have nothing else to go on.

Depending upon the circumstance, the reader may be upset by any or all of the following reasons:
1. They keep waiting for the story to go back to the character they got to know in chapter 1 and are frustrated that it never does.
2. Frustration at having been emotionally cheated out of a character they spent a chapter investing in when they figure out that he's not coming back.
3. Lack of empathy with your real protagonist because he wasn't there first...they may not even realize who the protagonist is supposed to be.

Speaking frankly, the first example you provided sounds clunky in several different ways.
1. It begins with a character who is not the protagonist.
2. It immediately goes to a flashback. This is a key sign that you began in the wrong place. Flashbacks are meaningless if the reader is not immersed enough in the present time to continue caring about it as they read the backstory -- if you've begun with a throw-away character, the normal problems with flashbacks get compounded.
3. This is a guess...I could be way off, but it sounds like when you say "gives some milieu and character intros" that you may be presenting an info dump. Especially if one of these characters you introduce really is the true protagonist of the story then not only have you failed to mention him right off, but you may have given us little reason to care about him in the follow-up.

I'm not sure how it would be in actuality ( that is I do not remember ever reading a story like this ), but I think if the story develops any characters at all, then that development begins an emotional connection with the reader, even if that connection were very small, it would be disappointing to have it abruptly ended. So I can see how it would throw people off.

In the second story that you outlined wouldn't it be more effective to spend the time developing and making one care about the protagonist and then have the death make a huge impact? Something like "Meet Joe Black" You don't know who was driving the vehicle that slams into him. In fact that would be another story.

Be wary of falling into the "red shirt" problem. It got so bad on the numerous "Star Trek" series and movies that every time one of the regulars wasn't sitting at his assigned station, you knew full well the (usually voiceless) character that was would die.

Jurassic Park (the book) opens with disposable characters. They are a family trying to find a deserted beach to have a picnic. At the end of the chapter, they’re attacked by small dinosaurs.

In The Oath (Frank Peretti) the book opens with the death of a disposable character. Much later, you find out the character was the MC's brother.

I think creature stories almost always open with disposable characters.

Here are some BAD movies that illustrate my point:

Attack of the Giant Gila Monster
The first person to die is a nameless door-to-door salesman.

Beware the Blob
It opens with the killing of a kitten; clearly a disposable character.

Of course, your creature story doesn't have to be BAD.
In a creature story I think people expect the first victims to be disposable. They are only there to show the audience how horrible the monster is.
"Oh the horror, it killed a kitten!"

Edited to say:
FYI - None of those examples are followed with a flashback. That might be a problem.

As for how developed they are. In the first example the guy, 'BUBBA' gets one paragraph, the main characters get introduced and at the end of chapter 1 the events that led to BUBBA's death are given. The means of his death are the secondary storyline and the characters can go around talking about BUBBA.
I could probably kill this guy off quicker, do it from the perspective of the beast and move the "action" sequence to the end of the chapter. A couple lines to say, "It ate him."

The second example is couple paragraphs for the character that I gave a name instead of saying, 'He' became upset and accidentally killed the protagonist.

Thanks for the thoughs/ideas/suggestions.

One of the more sucessful ways I've seen this device used was in Grisham's "The Testament", where you witness the narrator's planned demise as it happens -- which sets off the other characters' actions for the rest of the book.

1. There is far less emotional investment in an on-screen character. One of the things books do far better than movies is get you to know the characters, inside and out. On the screen, they're all just pretty faces until they do something heroic.
2. Movies take far less time to watch than novels take to read. A two-minute death sequence at the beginning of a movie is over with quickly.
3. Movies that successfully use throw-away characters make it clear up front that this character is not actually important: they are not actors you know (unless you pay very close attention to actors with small parts), they have few or no lines, they have little or no human interaction, or they do something shady to begni with so you know not to sympathize with them. Some of these strategies can work in books.

One other strategy that can work in books is a PROLOGUE. I do not necessarily expect anything from the prologue to be true in the book, including who the main character is. I often see prologues use in dramatic ways to show the point of view of the bad guy, for example. The simple act of putting it in that prologue may help.

BUT...
*He is never named and he's quite young. I never set him up as anything resembling a major character.
*The chapter is VERY short--just over 1000 words.
*His purpose is to give the reader a glimpse of the antagonist and to set up a horrific situation. I could not do that using one of the bad guys as the POV character. His role is to represent his people.

Just to squirt more fuel on the fire. I'm not defending their "art", but the folks writing all the TV and movie scripts killing off walk-ons are getting paid good money on a regular basis. People spend far more time watching TV/movies than reading, so that's what they identify with. Nothing smells more like success than money. Yada, yada, yada.

The good news is, in story with the guy that gets eaten, I found/wrote a scene at the end of chapter two that has a cliffhanger AND involves the two primary characters. Cut, paste, done.

In Chapter 1, the only living character is seen at a distance by the POV character and executed. We know it's the same character because he had a distinguishing feature, but the POV character knows almost nothing about him. It worked to connect me to the events in the prologue and make me realize their larger significance. It made me feel smarter than the POV character, without making me feel like he was stupid--almost always a good thing.

It isn't even possible to kill a POV character at any point in a movie or similar work, because movies don't have POV characters.

Movies are told in a special form of third person omniscient...a camera's eye view. The point of view is the camera...there is no person.

It was pretty strange, because I guess the audience was expected to get an idea of how it "felt" to be a soldier sent to a M.A.S.H. unit, but since they couldn't really convey the feelings, the audience had to imagine them.

It was analoguous, in a way, to second person POV.

Sounds like BLAIR WITCH PROJECT.

Of course directors are going to try stuff like this to imitate the effect of POV, just as writers are going to try to imitate the "limited camera eye" effect of movies.

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For whatever it may be worth, they tried to do POV on M*A*S*H once when they filmed an episode as if the camera were looking out of the eyes of a wounded soldier. If I remember correctly, the soldier had an injury that prevented him from being able to speak, and that's how they dealt with the audience not being able to talk to the actors.

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I remember that episode -- it was very interesting, to say the least! Another example of this can be seen in "Being John Malkovich".

When go to a movie, however, I really do feel like I'm slipping inside a character's shoes for a couple of hours. I become Clarice Starling, stalking a serial killer. I become Indiana Jones, fighting bad guys in the desert. I don't feel like I'm "watching" them, at all.

(But then, I always have had an overactive imagination.)

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It was pretty strange, because I guess the audience was expected to get an idea of how it "felt" to be a soldier sent to a M.A.S.H. unit,

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