a.) It’s a short story
b.) Is it on the last page?
I’m not looking for a listing of simple Twist Endings. we’d be here forever. I’m looking for cases of long stories (“novels”, the OP says) where the twist/solution/whatever appears on the very last page (ideally the last paragraph, sentence, or word) without any follow-up or wind-down.
I can’t remember if the twist in Dogs of War was on the last page but if not it wasn’t more than a page earlier.
I don’t think the Contact final twist made it into the movie at all. I’ll have to remember the next time I see it, and when come back, bring.
Nope, not in the movie. I was really disappointed with that, but it would be hard to explain to someone without a mathematical background.
Another good example is the end of the novel Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle. Not to give away his original ending except to say there’s more to the story beyond what the movie has. I believe it is actually the very last line.
I have this story in an anthology, so it may vary depending on where you read it, but in this one, I’d said the twist is on the second to last page.
So it’s not the fact that
her personal recorder (or something like that) had 45 minutes of static, even though the event lasted less than one second in local time?
I think that was mentioned in a private conversation near the end of the movie, after the congressional hearing.
I was thinking about the thing that involves the number pi. Certainly not in the movie but totally nerdy.
What Roderick Femm mentioned is in the movie, and proves that the aliens really were communicating with us. What the book ends with proves something much, much bigger.
I guess I’ll have to read it then.
Sharyn McCrumb’s novel Prayers the Devil Answers.
I have it in ebook form, so it depends on how big your pages are. It may be a front and back page, but it’s close enough to the end that I’d count it
Who Censored Roger Rabbit (the book the movie is based on). The main case–who killed Roger Rabbit’s boss–is revealed only in the last few paragraphs. Of course, like much of detective fiction, the astute reader could have figured it out.
The mystery in the title, on the other hand, I don’t think a reader could figure out. At most, they might guess.
Now that you have teased us, can you write a spoiler and let us know? I couldn’t find a synopsis of the story, and I’m curious.
Yeah to say the least. I read Riddlemaster, years ago. We didn’t have the other two books in the trilogy. This was decades before the internet. It took me years to find out what happened next.
The aliens she meets tell her that they, too, are receiving messages from a power higher than themselves, but the messages they’re getting are not transmitted by radio, but encoded in fundamental mathematics, as, for instance, in the digits of pi. So after the mission, Arroway commissions some supercomputer time to calculate umpteen-many digits of pi, and does indeed find a (very simple) message in them (far more quickly than a message of that length could be expected in the digits of a normal number). Thus implying that there exists an entity or entities capable of manipulating even the laws of mathematics. In other words, God.
Ah! Neat idea. Thank you.
True, but the entire chapter before it is explaining all the logic behind the accusation. It’s just that it doesn’t flat out say the name of the character it’s describing until that last sentence. I feel like it’s kind of a weird, borderline inapplicable, example for that reason. But that’s subjective, of course.
To be fair, that last line is foreshadowed.
Not a mystery, but certainly a twist - A Boy and His Dog by Harlan Ellison
Pretty sure that Harlen Coben’s “Tell No One” did this.
Or on the other hand, there’s Asimov’s Foundation, where he put the answer to the Big Mystery in the prologue… and still had fans going crazy trying to figure it out for years until the sequel came out.