My grandson loves to read. He's fourteen and an avid fan of fantasy novels. Many of them are over six hundred pages long, which I find stunning. Not in a beautiful way, mind you. In an astonished and overwhelmed way, more like.
He started reading one of his tomes a couple days ago (I won't mention names) and informed me that there were five assassinations within the first sixty pages. I was stunned. Obviously, a great many characters had already been introduced before those first sixty pages.
I guess a lot of readers like a lot of characters early on. And, as they die, more. Let's see: if there are five gruesome deaths in sixty pages, that means fifty people are dispatched hideously throughout the entire novel. I used to write screenplays. It would be mind-boggling to create a motion picture with that mortality rate. Although we see it in the John Wick films, we don't know who all those dead people are. Just a handful. Including John.
Frankly, I like my novels populated with a small collection of memorable characters. There might be a death or two throughout the entire series, but that's typical of life in general. We come and we go--circle of life stuff.
I give my small cast of characters a lot of intriguing and endearing qualities (except for George and Dale) which entices readers to keep coming back. There's no flipping back and forth to remember who's who. They all have specific roles to play in the story development and they all change and grow in unique ways as they participate.
There's never a dull moment in my grandson's fantasies only because there's so much to remember. There's never a dull moment in my novels only because there are so many memories being made.
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