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).
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.
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.
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)
[/QUOTE]
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.
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…
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.
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.
Hell I remember my teacher telling me not to end stories that way when I was about 8 or so. She was so right…
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.
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.
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 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.
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.)
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.
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.
I’m with you. Sphere was among Crichton’s less entertaining books, but nothing about the ending struck me as particularly off.
All three LOTR books had a WTF ending if you think about it.
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.
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.
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.