# Books that start good, end bad **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [April 2, 2002, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415 "2002-04-02T17:15:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Why\_A\_Duck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/13edae/32.png) [@Why\_A\_Duck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Why_A_Duck)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2002, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415/21 "2002-04-02T20:24:44Z")
This thread pretty much describes **Lonesome Dove** perfectly. The first 700 pages or so were magnificent. But it was almost like McMurtry had a page limit and was running out of room. The whole thing wrapped up way too quickly and way too conveniently. It was a case of “Okay, let’s see… You, you, and you are dead. You over there, your quest for acceptance … sorry, no.” ---
**Author:** ![Munch](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/munch/32/5281_2.png) [@Munch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Munch)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2002, 8:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415/22 "2002-04-02T20:53:05Z")
**Gathering Blue** by Lois Lowery was a pretty good book. She does an excellent job of creating seamingly utopian societies, usually historically placed some time after a nuclear holocost-like event. The coming of age stories of the characters are very interesting. But in this book, just when you think the main character is going to fully develop, and utilize all the skills she’s learned throughout the book, she throws it all away and stays with her captors. I was absolutely dumbfounded. ---
**Author:** ![bobkitty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/c67d28/32.png) [@bobkitty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bobkitty)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2002, 11:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415/23 "2002-04-02T23:50:00Z")
::bobkitty enters carrying several lengths of rope:: 'Scuse me… pardon me… oops, sorry about that… ::whistles cheerfully as she ties **Max Carnage** and **Kirkland** to nearby chairs:: Now, I believe you were saying something about Mr. Crichton? ::takes out cattle prod:: Something about him being God Incarnate? And the best writer _ever_? That _is_ what you were saying, right? Oh, and I’d like to add _The Witching Hour_ by Anne Rice to the list. -BK ---
**Author:** ![Kirkland1244](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/dc4da7/32.png) [@Kirkland1244](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kirkland1244)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2002, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415/24 "2002-04-03T00:14:06Z")
Crichton is a hack, and not even a good hack at that. Kirk ---
**Author:** ![widdershins](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/f0a364/32.png) [@widdershins](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/widdershins)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2002, 12:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415/25 "2002-04-03T00:51:47Z")
_Green River Rising_ by Tim Willocks. A novel about a prison riot. Interesting characters, great motivations, creepy interplay of the different factions and gangs, a nice building of tension and menace - until we get to the actual riot. Then it all goes flat. After the first part of the riot, our heroes are trying to escape through the sewer. Lots of long dull descriptions of wading through sewers, avoiding rats, and the occasional confrontation with prison psychos who somehow manage to catch up to the heroes despite their huge headstart. The rest of the book is fleshed out with interludes to kill off characters who never panned out in the story. What a waste of potential. _Underworld_ by Don Delillio. Some great stretches of writing that never add up. It would have been better as a collection of short stories all going off on tangents from a common event . Jumping from character to character, foward and back in time, doesn’t make it a good novel, no matter stylish the writing. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Man\_Who](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c2a13f/32.png) [@The\_Man\_Who](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Man_Who)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2002, 1:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415/26 "2002-04-03T01:47:51Z")
Bee Season. ☹ Bee Season. :eek: Dear God, Bee Season. :mad: And the only reason the thing started good was because Maya Goldberg stole all the Spelling Bee imagery from Neil Steinberg’s column about spelling bees. I hated this book so much I deliberately remembered the author’s name so I can NEVER BUY ONE OF HER BOOK AGAIN! -Myron Bee Season. :smashy: ---
**Author:** ![Green\_Bean](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/green_bean/32/1760_2.png) [@Green\_Bean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Green_Bean)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2002, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415/27 "2002-04-03T01:48:54Z")
**Stranger in a Strange Land**. The first half (approximately) was fascinating. Then he got into all that weird and boring religion stuff. It’s like 2 different books in the same binding. ---
**Author:** ![Tuckerfan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/eada6e/32.png) [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2002, 2:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415/28 "2002-04-03T02:29:00Z")
**3001** by Arthur C. Clarke. It starts out a little weak, but gets better and then suddenly ends. It’s like Clarke had all these ideas laying around and just threw them into the book, used some of the characters from **2001** , and then slapped an ending on it. One thing I never could understand was why the Earth was practically uninhabitable. Clarke makes a big deal about it, but never really says _why_ the planet was unsafe for humans to live there. ---
**Author:** ![Weird\_AL\_Einstein](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/c67d28/32.png) [@Weird\_AL\_Einstein](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Weird_AL_Einstein)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2002, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415/29 "2002-04-03T03:01:55Z")
Heinlein fan that I am, I do have to agree about the 2 Heinlein titles mentioned here, especially “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls”. I also agree about Steven King, and I was especially disappointed by the ending in “Insomnia”, over something I felt should have been in there, but wasn’t. I was also deeply disappointed by the endings of Asimov’s “Foundation’s Edge” and “Foundation and Earth”, and thus by derivation with the entire “Foundation” series. ---
**Author:** ![KarlGauss](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/karlgauss/32/3713_2.png) [@KarlGauss](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KarlGauss)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2002, 3:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415/30 "2002-04-03T03:07:38Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by widdershins \* > \*\* > _Underworld_ by Don Delillio. \*\* I will second **Underworld**. After what was among the best, maybe _the_ best opening chapter I’ve ever read, the book begins an inexorable decline into, into … into something most unpleasant. In truth, I have never finished its 800+ pages (despite such an auspicious beginning). ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2002, 4:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415/31 "2002-04-03T04:50:15Z")
Otoh, King’s _Misery_ ended perfectly and on the perfect note. Back on topic… His _Rose Madder_, on the other hand… Started off with one of the most wrenching scenes he ever penned (a battered wife being beaten into a miscarriage), ended with the lamest finale of the 1990’s. I think the descent in the quality of that book from start to finish was the greatest I have ever seen. ---
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2002, 7:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415/32 "2002-04-03T07:08:17Z")
The Squares of the City by John Brunner. He is an excellent authour who, IMHO, just came up with a “brilliant idea” which he simply had to put in a book and fleshed it all out from there. Unfortunatly, as these things tend to happen, the book changed radically in the process of writing and the clever idea just seemed arkward when he revealed it at the end. It is an excellent book in its own right but the ending just ruined it. ---
**Author:** ![buckgully](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/eb9ed0/32.png) [@buckgully](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/buckgully)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2002, 7:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415/33 "2002-04-03T07:52:17Z")
Ditto for _Stranger in a Strange Land_, I got the feeling that at some point during the writing of that book Heinlein descended headlong into dirty-old-manhood and just wanted to see how much weird sex he could work into it. I’m not sure if _Timeline_ fits this category, as it pretty much started sucking right from the begining. There’s another book with almost the exact same premise, only with a much better execution, called _The Doomsday Book_ by Connie Willis. I really think that _Timeline_ was just a movie script hastily into novel form. This is probably like shooting fish in a barrel, but the whole Robert Jordan “Wheel of Time” series started out pretty good (though not all that particularly original) for about the first three books, and then devolved into page after page of incredibly detailed descriptions of minor characters, most of whom will never appear in the books again. Nothing ever happens to anyone. I think some of the characters have been travelling from point a to point b for more that 3000 pages. ---
**Author:** ![HP\_Ellison](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3da27b/32.png) [@HP\_Ellison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HP_Ellison)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2002, 8:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415/34 "2002-04-03T08:28:25Z")
I know this book is a classic, but I hated the ending to The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Up until the last thirty pages or so, I loved this book; a tour-de-force of depression and squallor written in such a cruelly beautiful way. However, then the main character finds socialism and the entire end of the book serves only as propaganda. It almost ruined every good thing about the book, for god’s sake. However, to its credit, one doesn’t see a deus ex machina with a political party doing the saving all that often. ---
**Author:** ![Leifsmama](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a698b9/32.png) [@Leifsmama](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leifsmama)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2002, 4:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415/35 "2002-04-03T16:15:05Z")
I’ll admit, I thought the end of The Jungle was kind of sudden, but I saw it as a “unwritten” ending, if that makes any sense? The story didn’t end so much as the author just stopped writing. I found it appropriate for such a bleak story. ---
**Author:** ![fiddlesticks](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fiddlesticks/32/18129_2.png) [@fiddlesticks](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fiddlesticks)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2002, 5:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415/36 "2002-04-03T17:31:19Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by KarlGauss \* > \*\* > > I will second **Underworld**. After what was among the best, maybe _the_ best opening chapter I’ve ever read, the book begins an inexorable decline into, into … into something most unpleasant. In truth, I have never finished its 800+ pages (despite such an auspicious beginning). \*\* Hmmm…seems like this is a DeLillo trademark. Of course, as a writer of Capital-L literature, I’m sure DeLillo has his reasons for his fuzzy endings. I just finished reading **White Noise** and found its ending very unsatisfactory. Truth be told, I don’t recall the ending to Underworld, while the opening chapter is still fresh in my mind as if I read it yesterday. ---
**Author:** ![CrankyAsAnOldMan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crankyasanoldman/32/11670_2.png) [@CrankyAsAnOldMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CrankyAsAnOldMan)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2002, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415/37 "2002-04-03T19:13:11Z")
I recently read an Anita Shreve book entitled “Where we once belonged” or something similar. It was okay, not fantabulous, but then at the end she throws in what is probably supposed to be a kicker but for me was just a lame, confusing, irritating copout. I think I yelled some obscenity and promptly called my friend Cat to curse her for giving me the book. Spoiler: The whole book outlines meetings between two people who were once in love. Through various decades their paths cross and they never fully reconnect although they try. in the final chapter, you learn that the woman died in a car wreck when both were teenagers and none of these meetings ever happened. What?!? Ayn Rand probably fits the OP. Interesting ideas and promising premises, but then she just hammers them right into the ground so you can’t bear to finish the work. ---
**Author:** ![BiblioCat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ed8c4c/32.png) [@BiblioCat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BiblioCat)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2002, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415/38 "2002-04-03T19:40:50Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by CrankyAsAnOldMan \* > **I recently read an Anita Shreve book entitled “Where we once belonged” or something similar. It was okay, not fantabulous, but then at the end she throws in what is probably supposed to be a kicker but for me was just a lame, confusing, irritating copout. I think I yelled some obscenity and promptly called my friend Cat to curse her for giving me the book.** ROFL, it was called _The Last Time They Met_. Yes, I got to the end and was saying, “WTF?!?” Wanna be even more confused? Try reading Shreve’s _The Weight Of Water_. It’s really weird. It ties in with TLTTM, in a strange way. It has the guy (can’t remember his name, Tom?) in it. Shreve’s _The Pilot’s Wife_ is really good, though. Worth reading, and NOT disappointing. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_Carnage](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/max_carnage/32/12775_2.png) [@Max\_Carnage](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_Carnage)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2002, 8:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415/39 "2002-04-03T20:30:28Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by bobkitty \* > \*\*::bobkitty enters carrying several lengths of rope:: > > 'Scuse me… pardon me… oops, sorry about that… > > ::whistles cheerfully as she ties **Max Carnage** and **Kirkland** to nearby chairs:: > > Now, I believe you were saying something about Mr. Crichton? > > ::takes out cattle prod:: > > Something about him being God Incarnate? And the best writer _ever_? That _is_ what you were saying, right? > -BK \*\* Much as I’m into the kinky stuff, I gotta stand by my decision. Granted, it won’t stop me from reading the next book he writes (as long as it’s not another **Airframe** ) Now, I believe you were about to administer some punishment? 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Dumbguy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/2bfe46/32.png) [@Dumbguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dumbguy)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2002, 9:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415/40 "2002-04-03T21:34:35Z")
Cool. A Stephen King pile-on. I’ll go with _The Stand_. A thousand pages of deep, rich story-telling and meticulous character development… and then the crazy guy blows everyone up. Where’s a giant spider from outer space when you need one? I’d also like to ask **Why a Duck** to step outside so I can drop a Woodrow Call on his ass. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-start-good-end-bad/101415.md?page=3)