The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The ending is so bad that Ernest Hemingway, who considered it the greatest novel in American Literature, advised readers to just skip the last 15% or so of the book.
Michener has bugged me for a number of years regarding the ends of some of his books. For instance Centennial and Caravans. I came away with, “Really, that’s it? You’ve got to be kidding me. I’ve suffered through the birth of islands, evolution in general and plagues of biblical proportions and you give me this?”
It’s not bad at all. it’s just that so many other authors have used a variation on it since then, it’s become trite and overused.
Under The Dome, I spent the whole book waiting to see how the main baddie would get his comeuppance, and what caused The Done.
Instead, he has a heart attack and the Dome was aliens. Sigh.
Could have been worse: you could have watched the miniseries.
Hint: Don’t watch the miniseries.
I can’t believe I forgot Under The Dome. It wasn’t just that I didn’t like it, but the
kill them all (or just about) aspect of it just struck me as lazy. Like he didn’t know how to get them out, so just shoot the shaggy dog to tie up loose ends.
Yes, yes, yes. Dickens is known for stretching coincidence well past the limits of belief, but in this case Twain goes him about five better. Among other issues…
Bonfire of the Vanities
Loved the story, and I’m no fiction fan. But the last chapter seemed like either
- The author went, Oh shit, I gotta end this. I’ll just write anything.
or
- Some other person, not previously associated or even very knowledgeable about the book–certainly never having read it-- slipped their own last chapter into final manuscript and somehow the author, editor, publisher, no one noticed it.
I thought the movie played it the same way. Maybe the idea was to let the parody out fully at that point, but it just irritated me.
Atlas Shrugged. I really enjoyed the story: individualism, capitalism, objectivism, and all…right up until the point where it turned into a science fiction story.
This thread seems to have run down sufficiently that I don’t think a slight deflection will be minded: the same crappy-ending problem for nonfiction books.
It seems like every exposé, investigative or doom’n’gloom book I’ve read in recent years, even the best ones from good authors, have the same need as fiction authors to tack on a happy ending. Right up until chapter n-1, or an epilogue, the author pounds his or her thesis of problems or disaster. Then, chapter the last, and it’s Pollyanna-over-the-rainbow as they not only say things might magically get better, but sometimes question the accuracy of the whole preceding book.
I really can’t figure this out. If you’re going to “balance” the argument or equivocate, the place to do it is in the running exposition; the conclusion should be whatever you really feel is the case. It seems like publishers just won’t print a book about a bad present or future without this little happy-crappy tacked-on sendoff. And I hate it.
If we’re talking movies, The Right Stuff has a particularly weird ending.
Gordon Cooper was the last of the seven Mercury astronauts to go up. His capsule had a power failure and he had to land the thing manually, with no instruments. He used his knowledge of stars to find the right orientation by looking out the window and used his wristwatch for timing the retro rockets. This was an amazing feat, something never done by any other astronaut before or since. And for some bizarre reason, the makers of the movie chose to leave it out. The credits roll while we watch Gordon Cooper’s capsule still going up up up and there’s no mention at all of how he brings it down. It’s as if the director, on the last day of shooting the movie, suddenly said “Oh, dang. The camera just broke. Oh well, I guess we have to stop filming now. Let’s just end the movie right here.”
If we’re talking books, the ending which drove me nuts was Stuart Little. Halfway through the book, Stuart’s best friend (a bird) is convinced by the cat to leave and never come back. So Stuart goes off on a cross-country journey looking for the bird. I kept waiting to see what would happen when he finds the bird. On the very last page, the author says Stuart hasn’t found the bird yet but he’s confident that some day he will. The end. I was like “Are you kidding me???”
And since someone brought up Tolkien, I hated the ending of the LotR trilogy. The whole buildup was saving the world by destroying the ring. The ring ends up inside a volcano, the world is saved, Frodo can go home a hero. And then the damned book drags on for another 200 pages after that! There’s orc battles going on and I’m thinking “who cares? Frodo saved the world, the book should be over now. Please please please let me go back to playing video games now.”
Mrs. B. and other rabid Tolkeinites I know are furious that the ever-extending movie chain omitted the Scouring of the Shire, which is apparently the whole point of the saga to some.
Good one. I was like, did some pages fall out?
Dan Brown and his damn Da Vinci Code.
The guy can build an awesome head of steam, gotta give him that. By midbook we’re on the lam at the center of a conspiracy the unravelling of which will upend christianity (institutional and otherwise), shock the secular world, and lay down new foundations for our culture and civilization. By the last 10th of the book, though, he’s apparently realized he only knows how to write fast-moving action and isn’t up for even generalized paragraphs about a world in transition or sociopolitical upheaval, so nothing changes and nothing means anything. (It doesn’t help that the sooper secrit indicators of the true female divine have expanded and expanded until everything but the saran-wrap-clad heroine of The Sensuous Woman is a manifestation of the Daughter of God).
I agree - talk about your Heinlein SFional Hero! I can’t imagine being able to do something like that, and it really should have been the ending to the movie.
The Scouring of the Shire was stuck in to balance out the book so it followed the same format as the Hobit, which ends with Bilbo and Gandalf rolling in to see Bag End on the auction block. The book structures are roughly the same, 3 huge plot climaxes, and the concluding episode when they get home. [more or less the same breaks the Jackson movies hit - Goblin cave, Elvish palace, Battle of the 5 armies and then home to the auction because the Shire considered that after almost 2 years Bilbo was dead.]
While I was disappointed to not see the Scouring, it was not so horrible that I detested the whole set of movies - it was a decision to keep the movies to a particular run time, and cost decision. I think that you could make a short half an hour Scouring of the Shire however Grima Wormtongue and Sauruman more or less caused the capture and domination of the Shire and they were killed off back almost a whole movie, so it would need to be rewritten. [the lack of the Scouring is also why the tale end where Frodo, Bilbo et allia seems so ‘stuck on’ and distant.]
Around page 12? 
Cold Mountain. SPOILER
He spends most of the book trying to get back to her and in the last couple of pages BANG he’s dead. I went…WHA!!! :smack:
and went back and read it again in disbelief.
Yeah, and I hated the last chapter of the last Harry Potter also. I know Rowling was tired of the whole thing and probably just wanted to finish him off just so she wouldn’t have to write another book BUT… I always thought a better ending would of been Harry and the few remaining students graduating from Hogwarths with Drumbledore and Snape (as picture ghosts) cheering everyone on. Just my two cents worth of shouldas…
That’s like saying “Ulysses got back to Ithaca! Great, story’s over.”
No, story WASN’T over. The home he came back to wasn’t the place he left behind, and he had to fight to get his home, life and family back.
That’s a recurring theme in a LOT of epic literature.
I couldn’t agree more. You’ve characterized it perfectly, too. Maybe there’s a tacit agreement that people might jump out a window if they leave it too dark and so they “end on a happy note.”
Yes, within the scope of remaining days for planet Earth. The final extended special director’s cut fanwank edition of both series may require two lifetimes to watch. 
(Apropos of nothing in particular, one of my favorite answering machine messages ran something like this: “Thank you for calling the [Your Name] theatre. Our current offering is the twinbill Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and War and Peace. Next showing begins on Tuesday at ten a.m. and runs through Saturday at six p.m. There will be two intermissions and a Dippy Dawg cartoon.”)