"Happy Endings" first appears in Atwood's 1983 collection, Murder in the Dark: Short Fiction and Prose Poems. As Elspeth Cameron points out in the book Saturday Night, Murder in the Dark was "dramatically new [in] . . . its form" because Atwood "dispenses with the plot line that usually provides the skeleton for her fiction." Kathy Mezei, writing in West Coast Review, comments that in this collection Atwood is "pointedly not writing her usual cryptic poems or ironic novels; she is making notations of experiences, feeling, or the act of writing." K. Chase, however, in World Literature Today, finds this "unusual and disturbing" collection to be "characteristic" of Atwood's literary work.

Ildikó de Papp Carrington, writing for The Women's Review of Books believes that the collection "can be fully understood only in the context of [Atwood's] previous work." The book is divided into four sections. Both the third (to...