[SPOILERS] Series with disappointing final books?

[Spring Bass]

Kingdom of Thorn and Bone by Greg Keyes. The first two books were pretty good, the quality dropped significantly in the third, and I only made it halfway through the last.

I'll second that. The fourth book was appalling, particularly considering how interesting the first two books were.

[Exa Inova]

What makes authors bungle their endings, is it pressure, or is the drive that kept them going just disappeared?

Discuss.

Yippeeeeeeeeeee,

Im pretty sure we had this sort of thread before. Now I can bitch about this like those november 2005 people ;)

anyway: from memory (too lazy to look it up) people say Stehpen King writes pretty crappy endings and they come up with the Dark Tower series. Never read it but nothing like bitching about something you dont know.

As a hardcore Lemming I cant say much positive things about the end of the Yeards magus opus.

I do know I liked the Death Gate series but hated the ending. Other work by Weiss and Hickmann suffered the same flaw (among things).

I know I mentioned that I dint like/get the end of the Dune series, but that was because the author died and his son went on to brutally rape it before killing it.

I stopped reading the Wheel of Time before it ended (is it done?) but Jordan, when alive, claimed he had the ending in his mind all along and the books were the jouney to that destination. He didnt tell me that he would take alot of whiny people along for the ride and would give a discription of all garments like a f*cking fashion critic but at least he had the right idea imo.

btw, LotR has a stupid ending also, about 80 pages too much or so.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

I guess you could compare it to juggling or plate spinning. Keeping them all going and stopping without breaking or dropping something is two completely different skills.

[SkynJay]

Yippeeeeeeeeeee,

btw, LotR has a stupid ending also, about 80 pages too much or so.

Ill agree, and add Huck Finn to that. There was no reason to bring Tom Sawyer is and childish game back in at the end.

[Nerdanel]

Coldfire Trilogy by C. S. Friedman has a third book that is overall very weak and gets steadily worse as it progresses towards the terrible ending. Some new POV characters are particularly annoying, among other things.

The last book in the Secret Texts trilogy by Holly Lisle is such a disaster after the fairly nice two earlier books. The good guys spend most of the book noodling around resolving trivial sideplots and loose ends. An interesting plot thread introduced in the end of the previous book is ignored and then done away with in a sentence. The heroine suddenly turns emo. A new Mary Sue appears. A particularly depraved villain suddenly turns to the side of good thanks to said Mary Sue. A previously-intelligent villain suddenly loses most of his IQ and fails to notice the simple, quick, quiet, safe, and obvious way he could Win Everything Ever and instead tries to achieve the same end with cumbersome brute force guaranteed to alert the good guys.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

I have to disagree on "The Godless World". I thought the series finished strong. The ending was properly bittersweet. That said I really wanted a map of the parts of the world we never saw and a firm explanation of what happened to the "Gods". Or what the "Gods" actually were.

[SkynJay]

Well on Godless world, I didn't finish. The second left a semi-bitter taste, and I never moved on. So maybe for me its more of a "too much promise in the first book" type thing.

[haLobEnder]

Kingdom of Thorn and Bone by Greg Keyes. The first two books were pretty good, the quality dropped significantly in the third, and I only made it halfway through the last.

Totally agree. Though I think I was prepared for the let down of the last book by the third book which really wasn't that much better. Sad too, because that first book really was quite something --betrayal, murder, potential world-ending threat-- I thought it would end up being one of my favourite series.

I'd also add Tad Williams Shadowmarch series to the list, but I'd sort of be cheating because I've only read half of the last book. For all I know, the series could wrap up really well, but unfortunately trying to get there I've just lost my patience with William's over-verbosity.

Also agree on the Godless World. Huge disappointment.

[Andystoteles]

Well, we can look at it in terms of math:

Excpectation - reality = disappointment-level

example: we excpect that Harry potter and the deathly hallows be a 8/10 - in reality it´s a 5/10. That means that it has a disappointment-level of 3/10.

But that leaves us with the conclusion that Confessor is the best final book ever...

[ambyr]

Emphatically seconding (thirding?) Carey's Imriel trilogy and Flewelling's Tamir trilogy. Also nominating:

Jo Walton's Small Change trilogy. All that creepy alt-history buildup, with the Nazi sympathizers taking over Britain, and then

it finally occurs to someone to tell the Queen what's going on, she goes "Oh deary me! I did not know!" and fixes everything? No.

Sarah Rees Brennan's Demon trilogy. Two books tightly focused on four main characters, and then

the final book is narrated by a minor, outside character who is indifferent toward most of them. Alas, the book still tries to focus its arc on the connections between the original leads--which means the narrator spends a lot of time bumbling around in the dark eavesdropping on intense emotional conversations that she has no reason to care about and less reason to hear. I like series that change up who the POV character is, but rule one of doing that is surely that each book's plot has to focus on its POV character's area of interest.

[jellydonut]

Blue Mars, of the Mars trilogy. For unknown reasons, much less captivating than the first two books. :frown5:

[sologdin]

i love the paradiso, but, man, it's kinda bathetic, considering the awesomeness of the inferno.

[Spring Bass]

Blue Mars, of the Mars trilogy. For unknown reasons, much less captivating than the first two books. :frown5:

I think KSR must have gotten free of his editor, because bloat was a massive problem in that book. KSR apparently wanted to describe a lot of nature walks on terraformed Mars.

[Werthead]

The Born Queen (Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone) has to be a thread-winner, because the first two books were so damned entertaining and the third was okay. But the fourth was simply wank.

God of Clocks (Deepgate Codex) is almost at the same level, but I heard a rumour that Campbell wanted Scar Night to be a stand-alone and was heavily persuaded by his publishers to string it out into a trilogy, which at least explains the trilogy's descent into lacklusterdness. Even the Codex itself turned out to have nothing to do with the plot and was only mentioned a couple of times, and Deepgate itself only appeared in the first book and briefly in the third.

Absolution Gap is random and weird, magnified by the fact that the true end to the 'Inhibitors arc' of the Revelation Space universe is actually the title story from Galactic North, which Reynolds didn't bother to tell anyone about in Gap.

Kearney's Ships from the West (Monarchies of God) wasn't a total disaster, but it had a lot of problems brought about by being rushed and not having enough pages.

Tad Williams' To Green Angel Tower is actually pretty serviceable right up until the epilogue, which is so ludicrously corny that it's difficult not to throw the book across the room.

Rhialto the Marvellous (The Dying Earth) is pretty disappointing as well. Judas Unchained (Commonwealth Saga) had a really undersold ending, with the 500-page car chase being extremely dull.

I think we need an honourable-but-mitigated mention for Flashman on the March, the only Flashman book that felt a bit unconvincing and tacked-on, though it may be enhanced by Fraser's death meaning we'll never get to read the American Civil War epic. On a similar note, Titus Alone had promise but Mervyn Peake was far too ill to make it anything near as good as the first two Gormenghast books.

Series-closing novels which I thought worked out pretty well:

Steven Erikson's The Crippled God

Kate Elliott's Crown of Stars

Joe Abercrombie's Last Argument of Kings

Jack Vance's Madouc

Tad Williams' Sea of Silver Light

Kim Stanley Robinson's Pacific Edge

Peter F. Hamilton's Nanoflower and The Naked God (think I might be in the minority on the last one)

Brian Aldiss' Helliconia Winter

David Brin's Heaven's Reach (though there's supposed to be more books coming, so that might not be strictly fair)

Dan Abnett's Hereticus and Ravenor Rogue

[emberling]

anyway: from memory (too lazy to look it up) people say Stehpen King writes pretty crappy endings and they come up with the Dark Tower series. Never read it but nothing like bitching about something you dont know.

King is a perfect example of what I'm talking about: someone whose skills just don't cover good endings of larger works.

He's a strong advocate of "writing by the seat of one's pants"*, or eschewing such traditions as outlines, detailed planning, or a pre-defined plot. Rather, stories are 'found' by placing characters in a situation and figuring out what happens next; setting details are determined by the characters' needs, with consistency added in a later draft.

The technique has an enormous number of advantages, but sacrifices coherency to get them. For shorter works, particularly ones with fewer moving parts like The Shining or Misery, you don't even notice the loss. For longer ones like The Dark Tower and The Stand, you wonder what the fuck he was smoking, and the plot-threads meander around aimlessly, requiring desperate contrivances and eventually the most literal deus ex machina to wrap up.

*not King's words

[Jim Dixon]

The Born Queen (Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone) has to be a thread-winner, because the first two books were so damned entertaining and the third was okay. But the fourth was simply wank.

*facepalm*. I just started reading this one. I'm about halfway through the second book and loving it. This is really going to p!$$ me off isn't it?

Regarding King, his plotting is a mess but his characters and language make up for it, in my opinion. The ending with the Crimson King in the Dark Tower sucked but the epilogue is one of my favorite endings in spec fic.

[MaesterLuwin]

Regarding King, his plotting is a mess but his characters and language make up for it, in my opinion. The ending with the Crimson King in the Dark Tower sucked but the epilogue is one of my favorite endings in spec fic.

Agreed. While The Dark Tower series first came to mind when I saw the title of this thread, the last chapter is pretty good. It's just the two books that come before it that are terrible.

I originally hated the ending of The Stand, but the WTF-ness of it is so large that now I actually find it sort of endearing.

At any rate, I think I'd rather have one terrible ending than a series that jumps the shark in slow motion, ala The Wheel of Time. In those scenarios, you often don't notice how bad the books are getting until you're thousands of pages deep and its too late to pull out.

[Errant Bard]

+1 for the tamir trilogy. The bone doll's twin was great, the other two squandered both atmosphere and plot for bland teen romance (and bland warring... and even then I was so pissed at how that city girl turned warrior was basically forgotten). Too bad, it had great potential.

Also seconding the Hunger Games. The scope expansion following the first book was a bad thing.

Don't lynch me for that:

Dune: Very strong first book, a classic, even. The sequels I can only recall as being more and more pants on head stupid.

Amber: First chronicles were great, consistently. Merlin's books began just OK and devolved into an AD&D campaign without any subtility.

The Born Queen (Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone) has to be a thread-winner, because the first two books were so damned entertaining and the third was okay. But the fourth was simply wank.

I quite liked the last one, it was probably the most entertaining of the four, with big explosions, reincarnation and stuff. The others always felts contrived, without the sheer ludicrousness of the last one's development; the author tried too hard at first, then fell into fencing fanboy mode, then decided ridiculous twists were great, then it all became a nice comic book novel. I rate them OK->not so good->annoying->entertaining+making some sense some stuff in the previous ones. (seriously, who, from the first book first chapters, didn't roll his eyes as the author tries to be gritty by killing random unnamed people in the most ridiculously melodramatic way possible, while the heroes roll over everything basically unscathed? Then the melodrama gets worse. When it crosses the line twice in the fourth book, it becomes almost epic)

[Bronn is God]

Can someone vaguely spoil me with the ending of the Thorn and Bone series via PM please.

Errant Bards post makes me want to read it, but other reviewers make me not want to.

Is the ending so WTF stupid that it ruins the series? Or what?

[Fire Eater]

There are exceptions, Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour, the finale to the series, was the best book out of the whole series, O'Malley saved the best for last.