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Books with dissapointing endings


Tall Tyrion Lannister!

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I'm sure there has been a book or two in everybodies life where the ending has dissapointed them, whether it was a stupid ending, or just didn't live up to expectations you had.

I finished The Reckoning by Kelley Armstrong a while back. while it was a good book, better than the second at least. the ending was so goddamn wide open. Since it was the last book in the series i wanted mosto f the loose ends tied up. but the ending felt like a ending that would suit a middle book in a series, not the finally.

Anyway, what books left you being really dissapointed.

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Anything by Alistair Reynolds. That guy does NOT know how to wrap up a plot. The ending of the Revelation Space trilogy was bad enough that I gave all the books away to charity.

Stephen King is also pretty bad; he seems to have so much fun in dragging the story out as long as possible, and ends them with the grace of a 5-year-old being told that it's time to stop playing now and go to bed. Bag of Bones was memorably awful for that, but it happens to a varying degree in far too many of his books.

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Most of Jack Vance's novels pretty much end in a rush of serendipity and "The End". He's rightfully a grandmaster of SF/F, there's so much wonderment in his work, but good endings escaped him at almost every occasion (there are a handful of exceptions, such as the tragic final line of the Demon Princes saga).

Erikson's House of Chains and Midnight Tides, but I think my perceptions of the ending are probably colored by my general disaffection with what preceded in those novels.

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Anything by Alistair Reynolds. That guy does NOT know how to wrap up a plot. The ending of the Revelation Space trilogy was bad enough that I gave all the books away to charity.

I liked the endings of Pushing Ice and Chasm City, but apart from that, oh so this. It's like he treats all that pesky story and character stuff as necessary to give his Big Scientific Idea something to work against (even though he's actually really good at it), and once he's revealed said Big Scientific Idea he gets bored and wraps up the book as quickly as possible. House of Suns was particularly painful.

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The Dark Tower. It failed on so many levels. The worst was probably King's "OK, here's the ending, but you better not read it, and if you do and dislike it, it's your fault" rant just before it.

On second thought, the fact that the main villain was literally erased out of existence by some random guy who appeared out of nowhere in the plot towards the end of the last book of a 7 book series, was even worse.

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A recent read that disappointed me was Connie Willis' Blackout. I know it's supposed to have a sequel, but it's no excuse to end it on a dud.

To be fair to Willis, "All Clear" is not a sequel, it is the second half of a single novel. I have not been able to figure out why they were published separately.

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ruined the series

this sounds like a complaint that someone barfed on your shitburger.

I never thought the series was well-written, but I was still able to find a mindless, childish enjoyment from it when reading it with my grandkids. But the ending killed even that guilty pleasure.

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