# Books that when they ended you went "WHAAAAT?" **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [January 23, 2014, 12:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489 "2014-01-23T00:39:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![LawMonkey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/d6d6ee/32.png) [@LawMonkey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LawMonkey)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2014, 9:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489/41 "2014-01-23T21:44:42Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” and “Diamond Age”, but the ride was worth it both times. While I’m in what amounts to a microscopic minority by not being a raving, frothing fanboy of the book, I’d add _ **Cryptonomicon** _ to that list, except that a) the ride was in no way worth it and 2) I just slogged through nine-frickin’-hundred pages for **this**? With King popping up, I’m surprised no one’s mentioned _ **The Dark Tower** _ yet. IMO, on re-reading the series, it’s probably the only possible ending–but that didn’t stop people from being _pissed as fuck_ about it at the time (and still). ---
**Author:** ![Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/prof.pepperwinkle/32/13627_2.png) [@Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Prof.Pepperwinkle)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2014, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489/42 "2014-01-23T21:59:44Z")
_The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers_: no explanation for the mystery, no character development, no reason to have just read the rest of the book. ---
**Author:** ![mascaroni](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/dc4da7/32.png) [@mascaroni](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mascaroni)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2014, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489/43 "2014-01-23T22:07:17Z")
> [@oft\_wears\_hats](#): > > _The Man Who Was Thursday_. Granted, it was getting pretty crazy leading up to the end, but the end was still so abrupt and disappointing. Ninja’d by a a few seconds… ‘Disappointing’ is the right word… The book starts off so well, an intense, though slightly surreal, account of Anarchists in the UK [_they’re coming sometime and maybe…]_, but he couldn’t come up with an ending. I felt cheated. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2014, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489/44 "2014-01-23T23:15:08Z")
> [@mascaroni](#): > > 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. Aw, c’mon, it’s right in the subtitle: _The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare_. [QUOTE=G. K. Chesterton] I happen to have a very strong objection to that trick of missing the point of a story, or sometimes even the obvious sense of the very name of a story. I have sometimes had occasion to murmur meekly that those who endure the heavy labour of reading a book might possibly endure that of reading the title-page of a book. For there are more examples than may be imagined, in which earnest critics might solve many of their problems about what a book is, merely by discovering what it professes to be. ([http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/thursday-after.txt](http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/thursday-after.txt)) [/QUOTE] ---
**Author:** ![Morbo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/morbo/32/389_2.png) [@Morbo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Morbo)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2014, 11:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489/45 "2014-01-23T23:28:36Z")
Every single time a book/TV/film “was all a dream!” it gets a loud exhale and an annoyed shake of my head. The last time I was shocked by that was when I finished **Alice in Wonderland** when I was 12. ---
**Author:** ![DZedNConfused](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dzednconfused/32/15991_2.png) [@DZedNConfused](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DZedNConfused)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2014, 12:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489/46 "2014-01-24T00:06:57Z")
Every damn one of Martha Grimes’ books about Emma Graham and Hotel Paradise… could we just SOLVE one of the mysteries instead of sitting around talking about how awesome a writer William Faulkner is. “Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell” I reached the end and said quite audibly “The hell?” I admit to entirely missing the point of “American Gods” as well… ---
**Author:** ![C\_K\_Dexter\_Haven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/b2d939/32.png) [@C\_K\_Dexter\_Haven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/C_K_Dexter_Haven)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2014, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489/47 "2014-01-24T00:14:57Z")
Several of Robert Barnard’s mysteries end that way, but in a GOOD sense, with a surprise twist that was completely unexpected. For example:In _Death of an Old Goat_, Person A confronts Person B, says “I know you killed Person C and here’s why,” with a complicated mystery unravelled. Last line of the book is something like, "… and so Person B was convicted, not of the murder of Person C because it was too hard to prove, but of the murder of Person A."Comes as a complete surprise, an unexpected twist, that leaves reader saying “WHAAAAT?” and then laughing. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2014, 12:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489/48 "2014-01-24T00:49:37Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > Aw, c’mon, it’s right in the subtitle: _The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare_. Actually, I disagree on both accounts. It’s a great ending (if an implied one) and it’s not a dream (exactly). A nightmare? Sure. But it’s reality or unreality, even with its own frame of context, is completely irrelevant. The story is about the reconciliation of man to God allegorically. The point of the ending is the reconciliation did in fact happen. Hence at the end two of the characters are just strolling along and found something (or more accurately, _someone_) worth all the mess and strife. ---
**Author:** ![lisiate](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f05b48/32.png) [@lisiate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lisiate)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2014, 12:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489/49 "2014-01-24T00:55:31Z")
> [@Morbo](#): > > Every single time a book/TV/film “was all a dream!” it gets a loud exhale and an annoyed shake of my head. The last time I was shocked by that was when I finished **Alice in Wonderland** when I was 12. Hell I remember my teacher telling me not to end stories that way when I was about 8 or so. She was so right… ---
**Author:** ![ChockFullOfHeadyGoodness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chockfullofheadygoodness/32/511_2.png) [@ChockFullOfHeadyGoodness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ChockFullOfHeadyGoodness)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2014, 1:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489/50 "2014-01-24T01:03:36Z")
Philip Jose Farmer’s _The Magic Labyrinth_, which was hyped at the time as the “final” book in the Riverworld series that would answer all the mysteries of the previous books, ends at the bottom of a right hand page with a character saying something along the lines of “What was that? I thought I heard something”. Turn the page and it’s blank. I thought the library had gotten a defective copy or something. Checked other copies at a bookstore. Nope… that was the ending. And no, not all the mysteries had been answered. Although in retrospect, I should have been content with that ending, seeing as 3 years later, Farmer published the real final book _Gods of Riverworld_, which turned out to be a complete piece of crap. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2014, 1:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489/51 "2014-01-24T01:23:59Z")
The last few posts jogged this from my memory: one of Sue Grafton’s novels - it might have been R for Repetitive or P for Predictable - has Kinsey Millhone completely wrap up the murder mystery, and then, in the very last paragraph of the book, the wife of the victim (or some such) drops a minor comment that completely rearranges the case and proves she’s the killer. Last paragraph. ---
**Author:** ![Lamia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2014, 1:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489/52 "2014-01-24T01:29:50Z")
> [@njtt](#): > > 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.) It’s something along the lines of “All that remains of the ancient rose is its name; we have nothing left but the bare names.” So that seems thematically appropriate. IIRC Eco explains more about why he chose this quote in _Postscript to The Name of the Rose_ (a short book/long essay about writing _The Name of the Rose_), but I can’t remember the specifics. According to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose#Title) the quote is from a verse by a medieval monk; the entry isn’t very well written, but it sounds like the monk may actually have been writing about _Rome_ rather than a _rose_ and that “Roma” became “rosa” due to a transcription era by later monks. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/the_other_waldo_pepper/32/12370_2.png) [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2014, 1:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489/53 "2014-01-24T01:31:09Z")
> [@ChockFullOfHeadyGoodness](#): > > Philip Jose Farmer’s _The Magic Labyrinth_, which was hyped at the time as the “final” book in the Riverworld series that would answer all the mysteries of the previous books, ends at the bottom of a right hand page with a character saying something along the lines of “What was that? I thought I heard something”. Turn the page and it’s blank. Farmer’s hardcover of _The Unreasoning Mask_ surprised me with the same trick: there’s a cliffhanger, and you turn the page, and – you’re looking at two blank pages. And then you turn the page, and: two more blank pages. You maybe didn’t think that was the ending, since there were obviously so many pages yet to go, but, yeah, no. (Like you, I sought out a paperback and noted that it didn’t do likewise.) ---
**Author:** ![AuntiePam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f19dbf/32.png) [@AuntiePam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AuntiePam)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2014, 1:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489/54 "2014-01-24T01:36:59Z")
The ending of **The Historian** by Elizabeth Kostova is both shitty and whaaaaaat! I’ve bitched about this book plenty, but with reason. Five-six hundred pages of convoluted plot (with a side of amnesia) and deaths and travels all over Europe and mysterious letters and journals and maps and a search for Dracula and it ends when yep, they find Dracula, and it turns out he had engineered everything so that he could find someone to catalog the books in his library. Worst book I’ve ever read. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2014, 2:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489/55 "2014-01-24T02:47:34Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > I think he stopped writing the Ryan books eventually because Ryan would have had to be elevated to Pope, and he couldn’t figure out how to do it. > > or maybe God. The real reason apparently was he got divorced and a judge awarded his ex-wife half the proceeds from the Jack Ryan character. So Clancy decided to quit writing Ryan books. ---
**Author:** ![bldysabba](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ecccb3/32.png) [@bldysabba](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bldysabba)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2014, 7:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489/56 "2014-01-24T07:31:07Z")
> [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](#): > > 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? I’m with you. Sphere was among Crichton’s less entertaining books, but nothing about the ending struck me as particularly off. ---
**Author:** ![the\_diego](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7bcc69/32.png) [@the\_diego](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/the_diego)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2014, 10:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489/57 "2014-01-24T10:15:31Z")
All three LOTR books had a WTF ending if you think about it. ---
**Author:** ![kaylasdad99](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylasdad99/32/3398_2.png) [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2014, 10:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489/58 "2014-01-24T10:56:39Z")
_Lord Foul’s Bane_. There I was, congratulating myself on successfully slogging through chapter after chaptee of turgid narrative, and self-indulgent prose. Covenant was smiling, and perhaps contemplating a future in which he DIDN’T have to snarl his way through life as a self-loathimg misanthrope. Suddenly, I turned the page, and was confronted with a “coming soon” advert for “THE SECOND CHRONICLES OF THOMAS COVENANT THE UNBELIEVER.” It’s difficult to describe the sense of hurt and betrayal I felt, but I’m pretty sure the actual emotion was both preternatural and chthonic in its intensity. ---
**Author:** ![Gyrate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gyrate/32/3588_2.png) [@Gyrate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gyrate)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2014, 11:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489/59 "2014-01-24T11:10:24Z")
Both Stephenson and Chesterton are terrible at denouement, particularly the former who builds up incredibly complex worlds and then lets the story just sort of peter off, as if he isn’t quite sure how to end it. Bloody frustrating. I think Chesterton is more honest: in books like _Thursday_ and _Notting Hill_ he’s basically writing parables to make a particular point and once he makes it he ties it off with a quick restatement of the moral rather than a proper narrative resolution. The people in the stories are tools of the narrative and have no real life of their own; they only exist to further the moral of the story and not to be interesting in their own right. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2014, 1:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489/60 "2014-01-24T13:30:57Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > The real reason apparently was he got divorced and a judge awarded his ex-wife half the proceeds from the Jack Ryan character. So Clancy decided to quit writing Ryan books. Well, at least it saved him from trying to figure out how to move Ryan beyond President of the Us to World Benefactor or Emperor of the Universe. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-when-they-ended-you-went-whaaaat/679489.md?page=4)