[spoiler]A plane crashing into the US Capitol in DC where the House, Senate, Supreme Court, the President and Jack Ryan are there to witness Jack’s being sworn in as VP. By a string of improbable occurrences so unlikely a Google data center couldn’t calculate the odds, everybody in the room ends up dead except for Jack and his family. Everybody.
Jack gets sworn in as President in the most blatant coup since Glenda took over Oz. End of novel.[/spoiler]
I will admit, it was a hell of an ending, reading it for the first time. Then you’re like, “Wait, what?”
Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden. First of all, it was really gross all throughout, what with the death and rotting corpse in the basement and the brother lusting after his sister. Then it ends with the brother finally having sex with his sister on the last page, as if to say, “Whew, finally! All that tension pays off!” Or something. It was gross, and I’m sorry I read it.
Hate to be the contrarian on this one, but I’m genuinely curious: what part of the ending, in your opinion, didn’t follow logically from what had come before?
What part didn’t click with you? It’s been a while since I read it, but the ending seemed fairly straight-forward. Blockade instead of extermination. Although I seem to recall it left a few strands dangling for another sequel if they felt like it.
I think the book version of Andromeda Strain is the same as the movie…I won’t say I went “Whaaaa?” but as a kid, I was very confused as to what happened.
Also, don’t they show a jet pilots gear disintegrating before Andromeda escapes the lab? How did that happen? And I would hardly call an organism covering several states that can disintegrate plastics and rubber ‘harmless’.
Definitely agree. The book was basically torture porn. It seemed obvious to me that I was supposed to be rooting for Hannibal Lecter, not Clarice Starling or the FBI.
I suspect that Thomas Harris really likes Hannibal Lecter. That’s why the book ends with him escaping, and brainwashing Clarice into basically being his sex slave.
A different angle than you’re asking about, but when you read a book on a Kindle there’s a little progress indicator that tells you what percentage you are through the book. One book I purchased came with another entire book tacked on, free, which I didn’t realize. So there I was, happily at about 49% through the book, thinking “well, there’s quite a mid-book climax coming up here. Almost seems like the end of the book”. And then it WAS the end of the book, even though I was only 50% of the way through.
China Miéville “Kraken”.
I thought maybe I had missed something and it was just me who didn’t understand the ending - so I looked around online a bit for clarification. And this is how I learned about the trope “Gainax Ending”…
The Name of the Rose. I slogged all the way through the complicated philosophizing in many languages and then it ends: “Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.” I got a literal translation from my father the Latin professor, but he couldn’t explain why it should be a fulfilling closing to the book, and none of the explanations I’ve seen since were any more satisfactory. It seemed so unfair to bring together all the thousands of threads running through the book and tie them up neatly in a knot with a quotation that doesn’t feel like it has any significance.
Try reading the later Holmes novel the Valley of Fear sometime. It pulls the same trick of 1/2 Holmes, 1/2 the murderer’s backstory in elaborate detail.
The following book, Executive Orders, is the last book that “sounds” like it was written by the same person who wrote the previous books. Since then? Sounds like a completely different person.
Zelazny’s “Dream Master” which, I think, won a Nebula. I’ve read it a half dozen times over the years and still have no idea what happened. I seem to recall having the same problem with “Today We Choose Faces”. And to rub it in, I seem to recall that both of these novellas might have been included in the same paperback in one concentrated effervescent packet of mindfuck.
As I remember it (admittedly it is a long time since I read it, but I also saw the movie fairly recently), The Name of the Rose ends with the heroes looking back as they leave the monastery, and seeing the library burn, the flames looking like a great rose. That seemed like a fairly decent climax, with the murder solved and everything, with the fire somehow symbolizing the end of the middle ages and the oppressive rule of ancient texts. I do not remember that Latin quotation at all. What does it in fact mean? (Google translate just seems to turn it into gibberish, and my own Latin is very rusty.)
Actually, I always took the destruction of the library to represent the End of The World, which is alluded to frequently in the book (and the movie – all those clues from the Book of the Apocalypse). It’s stated explicitly that the plan of the library reflects the world itself.
It all hangs together symbolically, but I admit that I have no idea, beyond invoking the Apocalypse, it all means.
If it’s “WHAAAAT” as in “what a shitty cop out ending” , i’ll go for G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who was Thursday. It doesn’t deserve a spoiler (convenient, because I’ve forgotten how to do them), but it turns out it as all a dream. Not worth reading, (unless I’ve missed some subtle plot device)
If it’s “WHAAAAT” as in “blimey, I never expected that”, I’d go for:
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? Great book, but the ending was a total washout. The children are sitting there watching their house with their mother’s body burn up. WTF???