John Masefield’s otherwise completely excellent children’s fantasy, The Box of Delights, comes to an abrupt halt when:
the protagonist wakes up from his dream.
Really?
I submit Out of the Dark, by David Weber, 95 percent of the book is a straight forward alien invasion of Earth, with lots and lots of military jargon and description of equipment, and then, in the last 20 pages or so:
fucking ancient vampires from Transylvania join the rebels and kick the alien’s asses, because, you know, they’re supernatural and stuff.
I really wanted to read the book but I heard about the ending beforehand and it killed any and all interest.
Ben Elton’s Blast From The Past has a set up I could not image and an ending I could not predict. After shotting his long ago lover’s stalker, the American soldier shots himself
Midnight by Dean Koontz (really, any of his endings, the man is really a hack writer). During HS, I was an avid reader of his work, but every book left me feeling like “Huh, that’s how you’re going to end it?” Then I read Midnight and that was that. I decided no more for me. It was just too ridiculous.
I mean seriously A werewolf threesome that devolves into a giant amoeba killed by some guy crashing a plane into it? Seriously?
Hey now, those are fighting wor… um… er…
OK, I’ll give you that. Especially “Number of the Beast”, I really thought he was going somewhere until the end.
Stephen King’s Pet Semetary. I mean he took…you know…up to the you know. And then, damn, you know what happened! Many sleepless nights after that book.
The end of John Varley’s Millennium.
It turns out that the snatch program is being run by God (in the guise of a computer? Between the book and the goofy movie and the short story I forget which ending belonged where), giving it another shot because that whole Genesis thing was a bust and evolution didn’t turn out like he thought. Rough.
I’m fairly surprised I’m the first to mention Thomas Harris’ Hannibal. I probably don’t even need to create a spoiler.
Wow, that’s bad. But, in the guy’s defense, the endings of the few Koontzes I’ve read weren’t as bad as the worst King endings…
Watchers was a very satisfying book (hey, it had a genius dog, it had to be good), with a moving ending that fit the plot and the characters’ motivations.
Thinner is the best King ending I’ve ever read, IMO. The one time he hasn’t screwed it up somehow.
The Jaunt ending is freaky as hell but I wouldn’t say ‘‘out of left field.’’ You get the feeling from the very beginning that some bad shit is going down.
That’s not what I remember. I thought
In his lust for revenge, he accidentally passes the curse to his daughter.
Much more sinister.
olives, I think that was the “backfires” part.
He wants his wife to eat the pie with the gypsy curse in it, but both she and their daughter do. Realizing this, he eats some as well.
Ah, gotcha. I forgot about that part. Great ending. Ditto Pet Semetary. (The all time best ending is The Long Walk, though.) It’s rare that King can pull off an ending as disturbing and unsettling as the beginning and middle, but when he does it, man, he really does it.
Ed McBain’s “Calypso” had a very unexpected ending to the story, and unexpected for him as a writer who, though he wrote about murders, usually avoid the blood-and-gore of it. I’m sum it up in a spoiler box, both as a spoiler and because it is so disgustingly, disturbingly gory. You have been warned.
When the rich crazy lady who kidnapped the singer who she thought was the husband who died and brought him to her own private deserted island and kept him there as a prisoner and kept him naked so (in her mind) he couldn’t leave her realized the cops had found her and were going to rescue the guy, she made sure he would not go outside by cutting off his skin
Stephen King is a fan of McBain’s and I think he subconsciously copied many of these ideas in Misery.