Bonus pages for active readers
I miss the days when they put extra blank pages at the end of a book so that you could rewrite an unsatisfactory ending. (Someone once tried to tell me that the extra pages were the result of bulk paper cutting methods. They said it was cheaper to include the blank pages than to remove them. Yeah, I know. How ridiculous, right?) Of course, it wasn’t long before ads began to sully these blank pages, making them less than blank.
I’m not a fan of wastefulness, but if I have to rewrite your ending, why should I incur the cost of paper.
Being lazy, there are not many cases in which I feel compelled to rewrite someone else’s ending. Most books that manage to get published have at least a tolerable ending.
One book always springs to my mind when I think of bad endings. It’s a book called Hostage by a writer named Robert Crais. For those who saw the movie, the movie ending is vastly different–presumably because moviegoers would have insisted on their money back otherwise. While Hostage is not among Bruce Willis’s best, it’s also a prime example of the rare case when the movie is better than the book–for just this reason.
Part of the disappointment stems from the fact that the book has an outstanding premise for a thriller, and in my opinion it was carried off well until the end. (Another reason that I don’t come across too many terrible endings may be that I jettison books that aren’t so good, but this one fooled me.) Anyway, three delinquent kids rob a house and end up with a hostage situation with the homeowner’s two kids. The tension is ratcheted up when it turns out that the upscale home where the kids are being held up is owned by a mob accountant. Inside is evidence that could put half the mob away. The mob gets proactive by taking the police chief’s (i.e. the protagonist’s) family (ex and child) hostage and insisting that he get the evidence out before the house is stormed by the sheriff’s department and falls into an evidence locker.
SPOILER ALERT: Ultimately, our hero has no agency in the survival of himself or his family. It’s purely the decision of a mob enforcer that leaves them alive. I guess it could have been worse. It could have ended with him awaking from a dream.
What book gets your award for “worst-ending-ever”?
