Sticking the ending (or not)

[Wifetheif]

It is no mystery that there is an art to finding the proper ending of a novel or a story. Sometime we know the ending before we begin and the story is written around it. Other times the ending arrives organically through plot and character and sometime we just do the best we can and hope that no one notices that the author has no clothes. This inspired me to start a thread. What mainstream novel left you with that urge to fling the book against the wall and why?
In my case was the novel "Who Censored Roger Rabbit" by gene Wolf. The novel inspired the Disney movie "Who framed Roger Rabbit" but the studio widely rejected the plot of the novel. Why? Because it is a mystery where EVERY clue is a red herrring and there is no way for even the most careful reader to solve the mystery. In the end it is revealed that Roger had a genie in a lamp who granted him wishes! That is how he landed Jessica Rabbit and had his massive success! We only learn about this genie in the final pages! Dumb does not begin to describe it!
There is also the plot twist to a famous Science Fiction novel in which earth is being attacked by hostile aliens and just before humanity is expunged -- Count Dracula arises from his slumber in Romania, rallies humanity and defeats the aliens! I'm not joking!
What are some of your "favorite" moments of an author not sticking the landing to an otherwise excellent book? This should be fun.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

If we include film "Remember Me" comes to mind.

Decent movie from 2010, but you find out in the last few minutes that he works at the restaurant on top of the World Trade Center, and oh look it's September 11...

Just total bailout.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

Gary Wolf. Gene Wolfe was an entirely different writer.

There's a science fiction series starting with Beggars in Spain, by Nancy Kress, in which the world is set up for a huge catastrophe, as food production can't support the enormous population.

Then the superintelligent Sleepless ... use nanotech to make humans photosynthetic. That's it. A deus ex machine "no problem", or really a machina ex machina.

OK ....

For the record: humans can't survive by photosynthesis, even something enormously more efficient than what plants do. Not enough surface area, too high a metabolism.

--Annie

 

[ADirtyPerv]

Pulling one from my childhood. The Eragon series had the big bad die in a bizarre half-page scuffle, and then we were subjected to a hundred pages of loose-end tying, where the MC has a cheat code for all magic and is just... Disarming traps? Like a lot of them.

The big bad is dead at this point, the empire has fallen, and we're watching Luke Skywalker Eragon tinker with traps. And then he moves away because that's what the prophecy says he will do. It was weird.

 

[MrPixel]

For the record: humans can't survive by photosynthesis, even something enormously more efficient than what plants do. Not enough surface area, too high a metabolism.

And they'd have to run around outside nude. Is that a plot bunny?

 

[Britva415]

Pulling one from my childhood. The Eragon series had the big bad die in a bizarre half-page scuffle, and then we were subjected to a hundred pages of loose-end tying, where the MC has a cheat code for all magic and is just... Disarming traps? Like a lot of them.

The big bad is dead at this point, the empire has fallen, and we're watching Luke Skywalker Eragon tinker with traps. And then he moves away because that's what the prophecy says he will do. It was weird.

I’m amazed by the idea of reaching the end of the first book, much less the series.

 

[ADirtyPerv]

I’m amazed by the idea of reaching the end of the first book, much less the series.

I was maybe ten when I got the first book. I've always had trash taste, so it took me a long time to realize the series was really bad. Reading the last book helped that realization along for sure.

 

[YmaOHyd]

I've written about it before but the third book in the Bloodsucking Fiends trilogy is fucking awful in a whole bunch of ways, and I mostly think it was written so the publisher would stop asking the author for another sequel. The end of the series involves the two leads, who have given up everything in pursuit of their love affair, breaking up so the FMC can run away with a guy who's only introduced partway through the final book and the MMC, who works as an overnight stocker at a grocery store, can join a polycule with a mid-20s male Ph.D. student who does electrical engineering or something and a sixteen year old World of Darkness/Hello Kitty superfan. The third book (Bite Me) is awful start to finish but the ending burns the entire series to the ground then pisses on the ashes. It's the worst ending Christopher Moore ever wrote and he sucks absolute ass at endings.

I love Tim Power's On Stranger Tides, which was one of the inspirations for the very bad Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It does have all the indicators of a story that the author just didn't know how to end, though. Jack Shandy, the main character, fights a duel against a resurrected Blackbeard (?) and Blackbeard's zombies (??) on an abandoned dock (???) with the aid of his deceased former captain who shows up as a ghost/zombie (????) and his girlfriend/future wife (?????) who has hitherto unreferenced feminine magic (??????). The story goes from "okay, interesting, this is a weird development" to over in about ten pages. I don't know if Power was getting pressure from the publisher or his agent or whatever, but it certainly feels like he was past due.

One that I don't need to explain much is It, which is fairly famous for having a shitty ending. It's a spider and a bunch of children have sex. All the parts that don't make any sense are creepy or bad or both and all the parts that do make sense are also creepy or bad or both. The adult version of the ending is better but only because, again, it doesn't have a bunch of children running a train on someone.

Finally, Mercedes Lackey's Take a Thief is about a thief who gets magically kidnapped/brainwashed (because that's clearly what happens in all of these books even if the author wants to dance around it) into being a member of the magical Stasi (but it's ok because they're all Good and the people who think they're not good are Evil). Anyway, everyone's like 'but why should we allow a former thief to join the Stasi?' as if they have any choice in the matter and as if he has any real free will left or like any of this matters because he's obviously Good now. And the final words of the novel are a character saying to the thief "it seems we were right to take a thief." DELETE YOUR DRAFT, LACKEY, THIS IS HACK SHIT OF THE HIGHEST ORDER.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Cold Mountain.

I loved that book, right up to the last few pages. In fact, I have been thinking about rereading it, as it's a partial inspiration for an upcoming story. I thought, wow, Charles Frazier writes like Cormac McCarthy with a romantic streak. Then the ending ruined it. It negated everything that I had loved about the rest of the book. The main characters went through terrible struggles, and none of it meant anything. Yeah, an author has every right to make that choice, but it was a worn out schtick by the 1950s.

 

[MelissaBaby]

I love Tim Power's On Stranger Tides, which was one of the inspirations for the very bad Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It does have all the indicators of a story that the author just didn't know how to end, though. Jack Shandy, the main character, fights a duel against a resurrected Blackbeard (?) and Blackbeard's zombies (??) on an abandoned dock (???) with the aid of his deceased former captain who shows up as a ghost/zombie (????) and his girlfriend/future wife (?????) who has hitherto unreferenced feminine magic (??????). The story goes from "okay, interesting, this is a weird development" to over in about ten pages. I don't know if Power was getting pressure from the publisher or his agent or whatever, but it certainly feels like he was past due.

I don't know anyone else who has read this book, so I am glad to see that your opinion matches mine.

 

[YmaOHyd]

I don't know anyone else who has read this book, so I am glad to see that your opinion matches mine.

I also don't know anyone else who has read this! I like the book a lot and recommend it, but it does sorta feel like a concept in search of a plot at times.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

I love Tim Power's On Stranger Tides, which was one of the inspirations for the very bad Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It does have all the indicators of a story that the author just didn't know how to end, though. Jack Shandy, the main character, fights a duel against a resurrected Blackbeard (?) and Blackbeard's zombies (??) on an abandoned dock (???) with the aid of his deceased former captain who shows up as a ghost/zombie (????) and his girlfriend/future wife (?????) who has hitherto unreferenced feminine magic (??????). The story goes from "okay, interesting, this is a weird development" to over in about ten pages. I don't know if Power was getting pressure from the publisher or his agent or whatever, but it certainly feels like he was past due.

One that I don't need to explain much is It, which is fairly famous for having a shitty ending. It's a spider and a bunch of children have sex. All the parts that don't make any sense are creepy or bad or both and all the parts that do make sense are also creepy or bad or both. The adult version of the ending is better but only because, again, it doesn't have a bunch of children running a train on someone.

I also love Tides. I don't remember the ending being that confusing, but I read it at least 20 years ago. Maybe it's reread time.

It has nothing on The Stand, where the ending is literally "God blows up the bad guys with a bomb." And then a denouement which is pure sequel-bait.

--Annie

 

[alohadave]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53205988

Engines of Oblivion by Karen Osborne. In the last several pages of the second book of the duopoly, everything is wrapped up and every single loose end is resolved with a dues ex machina that made the main character effectively the leader of human society via a mind virus that reprogrammed every human's memories.

I don't know if this was always the intent, or the author wrote herself into a corner that she couldn't write her way out of.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

I also love Tides. I don't remember the ending being that confusing, but I read it at least 20 years ago. Maybe it's reread time.

It has nothing on The Stand, where the ending is literally "God blows up the bad guys with a bomb." And then a denouement which is pure sequel-bait.

--Annie

When in doubt Deus ex machina!

Stephen King isn't great at endings.

 

[YmaOHyd]

I also love Tides. I don't remember the ending being that confusing, but I read it at least 20 years ago. Maybe it's reread time.

I don't think the ending's confusing, precisely; it's just a bunch of stuff that maybe would have been nice to know earlier. Like the whole book goes along waiting for the vibes to be right for the ending, then he comes up with an idea (the compass trick) and that's the ending... but it feels like that would have been really nice know earlier, and something that other people would have known about and used...? I follow what's happening, it's just limp, if that makes sense.

The Stand also ends badly. King isn't good at endings.

Jeffrey Deaver's The Devil's Teardrop ends with the author hoping the readers won't notice that the hero probably let a kid freeze to death. He's usually okay with endings but this one was... not great. It's worse than the ending to The Bone Collector, where a quadriplegic defeats the BBEG in hand-to-hand combat (though that one is redeemed by the actual ending being the Rhyme/Sachs suicide decision-point).

 

[ADirtyPerv]

Stephanie Meyers's The Host is about weird centipede organisms that take over people's body like body snatchers. The FMC fights the takeover, and in the story both the body snatcher in the FMCs body and the actual FMC fall in love with different guys.

The ending... Has the body snatcher hop bodies to someone who doesn't fight the takeover, completely deleting a whole other human, just so the organism can live with the guy she loves.

Yaaayy?

 

[YmaOHyd]

Oh -- one more. The video game Neverwinter Nights 2 ends, literally, with Rocks Fall Everyone Dies after the player defeats a Load-Bearing Boss in a Collapsing Lair.

 

[VerbalAbuse]

Count Dracula arises from his slumber in Romania, rallies humanity and defeats the aliens!

this is so much better than the story writing in star wars!
brilliant. I love it.

 

[TheLobster]

The Stand also ends badly. King isn't good at endings.

But hey, it ends! After going through 1300+ pages, I’m sure that’s all everyone wishes for.

 

[Actingup]

Wally Lamb’s popular “The River Is Waiting” is beautifully written in the first person and is a heartbreaking story that will stay with you. But (spoiler alert) towards the end he kills the narrator between chapters with no way for the story to have been passed on to others - no diary, no secret audio recordings. The story is a logical impossibility. He might as well have written ‘and then I died’. Just awful.

Thanks for the thread!

 

[StillStunned]

The Night Angel Trilogy by Brent Weeks has its ups and downs, but overall it's enjoyable. But when I was reading the climax, it all just seemed to come together perfectly. Maybe I hadn't been paying attention, or I was in a very forgiving mood, but at the time I was blown away that I hadn't seen it coming.

One of my biggest disappointments was The Unforsaken Hiero, by Sterling E. Lanier. I'd read and loved Hiero's Journey, and I was quite happy with how it ended. Then years later I found the sequel, and loved it just as much. Only... Lanier never wrote any more. The story is clearly not finished, and my elation at finding the sequel made me feel even more bitter about the non-ending.

 

[ADirtyPerv]

The Night Angel Trilogy by Brent Weeks has its ups and downs, but overall it's enjoyable. But when I was reading the climax, it all just seemed to come together perfectly. Maybe I hadn't been paying attention, or I was in a very forgiving mood, but at the time I was blown away that I hadn't seen it coming.

That ending gutted me... And then he released a fourth book, focused on Viridiana and Kylar. It's a big ol' tome, and it ends in such a strange place.

 

[StillStunned]

That ending gutted me... And then he released a fourth book, focused on Viridiana and Kylar. It's a big ol' tome, and it ends in such a strange place.

I started on the prequel novella, and never finished. Despite enjoying the original trilogy, I never felt any inclination to read any of his other books - didn't even know there was a fourth book in the series.

 

[MelissaBaby]

I also love Tides. I don't remember the ending being that confusing, but I read it at least 20 years ago. Maybe it's reread time.

It has nothing on The Stand, where the ending is literally "God blows up the bad guys with a bomb." And then a denouement which is pure sequel-bait.

--Annie

It's a fun read, but the last part of the book feels like he was throwing in more ideas in order to provide fodder for a sequel, rather than to wrap up what had already been presented.

 

[MelissaBaby]

The Stand also ends badly. King isn't good at endings.

It's hard to get Mainers going, but once we start telling you a story, you can't make us shut up.

IMO, King nailed one perfect ending, and that is 11/22/63. Interesting, it's not the original ending. His son Joe told him that was crap, so he wrote a new one.