Yeah but Revelations doesnt match the rest of the NT :eek:
I don’t remember the twist coming that late. There was time to discuss the consequences and so forth. I’d call it a final turn of the screw more than a surprise twist. (It was foreshadowed and alluded to as well, unless I am misrecalling the book.)
Forsythe’s short stories almost all have O. Henry endings.
I just finished Joe Haldeman’s Work Done for Hire, in which a fiction writer and his girlfriend go on the lam in near-future America after some shadowy conspiracy keeps sending a high-tech rifle to the writer (a former Army sniper), trying to pressure him into killing some VIP to be named later. Turns out
a sleazy Hollywood producer was just trying to turn the writer into the unwitting star of a reality TV show. This producer and his mooks, mind you, can track the writer just about anywhere in the country, know everything about him and seem to be everywhere at once. In the last few pages the mooks turn on the producer and take him captive, and the writer is able to track down his by-then-kidnapped-by-the-mooks girlfriend and free her from an isolated seaside cabin in Maine, just as a SWAT team comes to the rescue.
WTF indeed.
It was WTF, kind of, but I thought the Christian/spiritual dimensions of the book earlier alluded to sort of set the stage. By no means King’s worst-ended book.
No, the twist I’m referring to is the one on the last two pages. It’s not foreshadowed, as far as I can recall.
I wrote a column on Cryolite, the mineral that they were mining in that place at the end of Smilla It’s a mineral with the very same refractive index as water, so if you have clear cryolite and put it in water, it disappears.
The problem is, nobody has clear cryolite anymore. The clear stuff occurred in bulk only one place in nature – in one mine in Ivigtut, Greenland. But the stuff is essential to the production of aluminum – it’s an aluminum flux, in the presence of which the aluminum oxide melts at a much lower temperature. During the second World War, the US basically went in with the British and took possession of the mine, which was a strategic material. Germany had taken Denmark, after all, and they were afraid they’d try to claim the cryolite mine in Greenland, without which there’d be no aluminum for the war.
Now that the mine is played out, they use artificially made cryolite, but it’s black and gray and ugly. It doesn’t disappear in water.
What does this have to do with Smilla’s Sense of Snow? Well, besides the reality of cryolite mines, there’s the danger. It turns out that Cryolite is low-level poisonous (one of its other uses, incredibly, was as insecticide), and the effects could be chronic. Cryolite workers were afflicted with it. So there was, indeed, something hidden in those mines. Not prehistoric worms, but insidiously poisonous minerals.
https://www.fluoridealert.org/wp-content/pesticides/cryolite.toxnet.hsdb.htm
If the weirdly science-fictiony aspects of the book bother you, think of it as an allegory for the hazards of industrial pollution on workers.
Oh, god. I’d heard good things about Weber, so this is the novel I picked up to give him a try. Other than the ordnance porn that made up like 2/3 of the book (“The missile was long, and sleek, and hard. 2.58 kilograms of high-grade military C3 nestled in its red tip” only more so), your spoiler is the main thing I remember.
Except that there were several chapters early on set in Romania, and there’s only one reason why a jackass like Weber would set chapters in Romania, so it wasn’t completely out of the blue, it was more like, “Oh god, he’s not really going to do that, is he?” then later, “He did that! I can’t believe he did that!”
So bad.
The most outrageous example of this that I have ever personally encountered was Michael Crichton’s “Sphere”. EVERY.SINGLE.PERSON I’ve ever known who read it has said, “What was with that ending?!?!?!?”
Publishing deadline, most likely. :smack:
Au contraire, sir. A young girl being an eager cum dumpster for a group of buds is a hard wired, deeply beloved fantasy/wank material for millions of men, and Stephen King just egged them on with his repulsive pandering to a sick fantasy. It shows a deep, basic disrespect for women and contributes to rape culture. If they wanted to BOND so badly in the book, why didn’t they just all suck each other off? I believe they wanted to, but King stuck the girl in there to take the taint of ‘gay’ off. She was just a receptacle for the males’ “bonding”. Should have used a watermelon! … But anyway, I stopped reading his idiotic doorstops after “It” and was not at ALL surprised to learn he was just churning out coke-fueled blather for his raving fans.
I disagree that this is a fantasy for many men at all. Why he put it in i do not know. But she was the hero of that piece. A theme of the kids adventure is that the danger forced them to grow up. Perhaps King meant the act to be a Rubicon between childhood and adulthood.
I, for one, never viewed it as sexualized. It was kids.
May I also add that none of the boys involved were sexualized in the novel; they were all damaged in one way or another. They were brutalized by the dominant males. I dont necessarily agree with your pov but am still open to furthet persuasion.
Joanne Fluke’s latest Hannah Swensen mystery The Banana Cream Pie murder has a totally WTF ending? The protagonist’s husband of one month intentionally disappears with no warning. Just runs off.
I disagree. I loved the ending. It’s been a couple of decades since I read it, but if I recall correctly:
Entering the sphere gave the individual the power to conjure up physically anything they imagine, even if they consciously didn’t know they were doing it. As the three explorers were being lifted back to the surface, they come to the conclusion that no one should have that kind of power, so they should all agree to forget or will away the power. So they do this, except one of the explorers has a smirk on his face after the other two lose the power…meaning he didn’t follow through with the plan.
I haven’t read it for years, either (I regarded it as one of the first signs of Crichton’s decline), but I think it was more -
The three survivors more or less just wished it all away, and the ship on the seabed and its contents were destroyed to keep them out of anyone else’s hands. I don’t remember the smirky part, but you could be right.
I didn’t see it as misogynistic or horrifying at all, just dumb. She was the heroine of the novel so I think it was almost a more maternal fantasy kind of thing, her showing them that she cared, but really, still very stupid. Let’s call it unimaginative. And it totally shattered my suspension of disbelief, which I’m quite good at doing with fantasy elements as long as the characters are behaving in a realistic way. King’s job was to figure out a way to express that bonding or ‘‘coming of age’’ while still maintaining the structural integrity of the characters he created, and he failed.
King, in general, is not a misogynistic writer. On the contrary, I think a lot of his works are very empowering for women. Gerald’s Game is one of my favorites. He writes a lot of compelling female characters.
Yes, but weirdly perfect in a metaphorical wtf kind of way.
<climbs two flights of stairs, slowly because of bad knee>
<looks in book>
<comes back down two flights of stairs even more slowly>
Oh. That ending. I’m not sure it’s as WTF as a final twist completely in character for Forsythe. Good one, though. See the ending of his short story “No Comebacks” for one even less telegraphed.
Especially since the whole book is (as one reader put it elsewhere) “a glorious mind-fuck.” 
Anna Quindlen’s Every Last One
I deeply resented the way she ended this book. I felt completely manipulated. If you’re interested, go to the link above and read the amazon reviews. There are also helpful comments at Goodreads. Many people recommend it. I absolutely do not.
Typical American family, issues, troubles, yaddayaddayadda… In the mother’s words:
Shit happens. Life goes on. But the ending! Grrr.
[spoiler]The family had befriended and taken in a troubled boy over a period of years. At the end of the book he murders every family member in each one’s bed and attempts to murder the mother, too. That’s the meaning of the title “every last one.”
I felt kicked in the gut, and to no good purpose. Some reviewers said they saw the red flags. Even so, the shocking ending was over the top. [/spoiler]
David Brin’s Earth ends with…
A microscopic black hole, orbiting inside the Earth, creates “circuitry” into which a dying Nobel Laureate pours her memories and becomes Gaia.
Not out of left field as some of theae, but a definite WTF? for me…
Ok…well said. Ignorance fought. 