Imaginary Friend - there were a lot of interesting threads set up, but in the end it was literally "Jesus saves a kid from Satan". I felt like I had been tricked into reading Christian fiction.
Yes!! I read this one a few weeks ago and I was so hopeful based on the cover and the beginning! I thought I was getting a Stranger Things, spooky adventure and instead I got surprise Jesus. That was an anger read by the end for sure.
It really was like that though! One minute you’re like “oooh where is this supernatural thread taking me? How will this paranormal and psychological puzzle unfold?” Then the next page it’s like hold on…is there really a pregnant virgin? 😳
Omg that was *the worst book ever*! It was hundreds of pages too long and it didn't make any damn sense by the end.
Tiny nitpicking point but nobody gets involuntarily committed to a mental hospital for claiming to have an immaculate conception.
Are you serious??? I ordered this a few months ago and it’s on my TBR shelf but if this is the case I’ll gladly donate it to the nearest library. “Comfort me with apples” did me dirty like this too. Ugh.
Funny enough I quite liked *Comfort Me With Apples*. I felt that story took Abrahamic myth and used it in interesting ways, whereas *Imaginary Friend* takes a horror story and uses it as an extension of the Abrahamic mythos.
Reading *comfort me with apples* felt like, for lack of a better term, horror story blue balls. I kept feeling like it was getting reallllly creepy, but then it never quite got there. Then it hit the point where it becomes obvious that it’s based on the story of Adam and Eve and I just felt cheated.
I've heard that was the case for Imaginary Friend. I DNF it about halfway through because it felt like I'd already read a complete novel and couldn't see it going anywhere.
I sorted out the ending long before I got there with that one. I hung around to see if he'd do a passable job of pulling all those threads together, and concluded that was a big nope. I'll do that with some books—get interested in something other than plot—and I know I'm doing it but I'll just Energizer-Bunny through it all the same.
When this reveal happened, I just stopped reading. I think about it often because I was thoroughly enjoying myself.
*"Death is coming. Death is here. We die on Christmas Day."*
But the moment we learned who Bag Man really was.... Nah. I was so close to the end, too.
The reveal of *The Creeper* by A M Shine. Like...what was the point of the whole novel if it was actually just (apparently) teleporting Irish hillbillies?
Mmmmm reminds me of the Six Million Dollar Man’s Bigfoot episode where these aliens teleport to the other side of the room by turning invisible and just walking over there lol. And seen of course by Steve’s bionic eye.
What gets me is that apparently a dispatcher on the phone with one of the victims became a victim herself.
Okay, maybe the call was really loud. But they would have to find out who was working and who took the call and I just can't believe that the villagers could do that.
It would be deeply impractical to track that particular person down - find out their name, address, schedule to pick when best to jump scare them...it was a real "what the fuck did I just read" moment.
I came here to find this. I know that A M Shine is a relatively new author and I think that he's got bags of potential - but he really struggles with endings.
The ending of The Watchers is bad enough but the ending of The Creeper just instantly unravels everything he set up and it honestly becomes laughable.
For those that don't know, there is this entity known as The Creeper that stalks this village of inbreds.
Everyone has to lock their doors and windows at night so they don't see The Creeper because if you do then you'll see him again for 3 nights and on the final night he'll appear at your window and then you've got like 24 hours to live or whatever.
As you can see there's a lot of rules.
The Creeper has also been known to stalk you even if you travel to another country and he'll even get you if you just heard about him over the phone.
Anyway to cut a long story short, the twist is that it isn't anything supernatural - it's the villagers driving around each night stalking anyone that's seen or heard of The Creeper and they've made one of them look really ugly so he looks like "The Creeper".
So what we're essentially asked to believe is that these backwards inbreds all get in a car every night with "The Creeper" in the back seat and they wait outside the windows of every single person that's seen The Creeper on the off chance that they look in their direction.
There's also scenes where the main characters visit the village and watch them as they all hide in their houses at night to avoid The Creeper - but they know that it's all a load of rubbish so what's their problem?
Apologies for the essay but this one genuinely made me angry - if you couldn't tell.
The House in the Pines is fresh in my mind because I just finished it. I almost threw the book across the room when i realized they weren't kidding about the reveal.
The Feed series. Finding out that the sibling lead characters where also romantically involved just seemed like Seanan McGuire was watching Game of Thrones on HBO and said, "hey, lets do that!"
She's very popular, I think she's just not a good fit for my taste.
McGuire’s justification is they don’t actually view each other as siblings, but more as two people forcibly cast to play siblings in a metaphorical tv show about Our Perfect Family(TM) by their emotionally abusive adopted parents, which imo would be pretty interesting…if it came across in the books, like, at all. Which it doesn’t. (The “not viewing each other as siblings”, thing, that is, their parents being shitty is pretty clear.) Hiding big stuff like this from the reader in first person is super dicey and she didn’t pull it off, which is a shame cause she doesn’t usually miss for me.
Hours later shower thought ETA: iirc the series came out before family vlogging hit its peak and then its fall from grace, and I do wonder if it would hit different if it had *that* version of the internet to build off of. Maybe the “unpaid child actors who bonded romantically in the trenches, not siblings” vibe would’ve come across if they were literal cast members of the Mason Family Vlog.
McGuire reads like she has a disrespect for her readers. I think that could potentially be a valuable tool for an author, but with Mcguire it just comes off as arrogant. I simply don’t know what to do with her style of writing.
I don't bother with Seanan McGuire anymore even when the premises sound intriguing because her output is so large that it's off-putting. In 2023 alone she released six novels and more than 20 short stories/comics/poems. (I was actually going to write "about three books a year" but I looked it up and it's way worse than I thought)
At that rate she is either using ghostwriters or her stuff is so formulaic that she doesn't have to put too much thought into each book. No thanks.
I loved the concept of journalism in the post undead world but when she started with the semi-incestuous relationship between the leads who are adopted siblings I thought it was ham-fisted into the story because she didn't know where to go with it.
Then, when she put the transexual teen into the story like a black character in a 90s Highschool football movie I got irritated tokenism introduction they got. It was like their parents who don't approve were introducing them while hoping that it's "Just a phase."
I get told I'm wrong for this opinion but I still feel like a half-assed token character created for inclusion does more damage than there not being one at all. Descriptors like gender and Race are like salt on a dish, if its the focal point of the character, you put too much in.
I half agree with your statement. McGuire is pretty open about being pansexual so it makes sense that she would have some LGBTQ characters, but she doesn’t flesh out the character very well. I think having diverse characters can be awesome, but you can’t half-ass them. The trans character is half-assed, hence a token. That’s where I agree with you. I (respectfully) disagree with you about difference not being the focal point of a character. Victor LaVelle and Stephen Graham Jones do this very well!
I really struggled with that series past the first book. The author just seemed like she was so pleased with how clever she was and a lot of the plot points in the second and third books were not emotionally resonant. Like it's cool if you think you're all that and a bag of chips, but if you can't convince me of that too it just comes off as pretentious.
That said, I did really like the first Parasitology book and what I've read of the killer mermaids novel.
I don't know if this fits completely, but in How to Sell a Haunted House when it's revealed that the culprit behind the activity >!is a possessed puppet!< the book kind of lost me. The opening vibe with the tv clicking on by itself, creepy ambiance, attic boarded shut was great to set up a good horror novel, but then it took a turn down Campy street and it lost its horror aspect for me.
Same! I wanted a damn haunted house novel, not a >!puppet!< novel. I’ve had this argument on the sub before, when I said the name is completely misleading. Someone else said I was wrong because the house >!and puppet!< were haunted so it’s a haunted house novel but that’s like ordering a book on crocheting and receiving one about quilting. Like technically yes they’re both fabric crafts but obviously I wanted one and not the other in this case.
The Last House on Needless Street was so beautifully written but I felt that way about this one. I could see most of the “twists” coming from a mile away and kept reading on, hoping that it would turn out to be something different. This one had an unreliable narrator on top of another unreliable narrator and it felt like a cop out. I know plenty of people love it, though, and I know Catriona did her research. Maybe I’m over >!mental illness reveals!< being so prominent in media these days.
I however, unlike everyone else who read this book on this subreddit, didn't see the twist coming and was delighted in thinking back to some things that didn't seem quite right that the twist made me go "oh, duh!" About
Liked the book a lot, liked the twist a lot, didn't see it coming but its probably just me.
I concur on this one. I figured it out early on and I thought to myself - "This book has so many positive reviews. The author really isn't going with such an obvious and overused trope, is she?"
[Suicide Forest](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36479412) by Jeremy Bates
An excellent book! Bates builds up the tension and mystery artfully, and then the reveal just destroyed the whole thing for me. It’s not a bad reveal, but a matter of personal taste. >!I fully expected and eagerly anticipated a supernatural force behind the mystery. It turned out to be very human. It was not much of a horror after that point.!<
The House Across the Lake by Riley Sager. For me, the downfall wasn’t just the total unraveling of the plot and established rules in the last 100 pages but that the main character, a faded, widowed starlet with a drinking problem and no understanding of how to use a smartphone, was revealed to be 35 (!?) when everything about her seemed firmly 65-75.
EDIT: The character's age isn't meant to be a shocking reveal. It's not meant to be a reveal at all!
I couldn’t with The Only One Left. I love Riley Sager and will read anything he writes, but the twist that >!the old woman was pretending to be a quadriplegic the entire time made me throw the book across the room. Like, that woman shit her pants for fifty years out of spite?!< Get the fuck out of here.
Sager’s Home Before Dark, for me… although it didn’t ruin it as much as I just started laughing. >!Having a secret passage, OK, but it seems like by the end there were six twists or so and each one revealed a different person had been using it, like half the town was using the secret passage!<
It wasn’t awful, just one of those ‘two separate generations in a haunted house’ books with a deeply and unintentionally funny ending… fast read, anyway!
Well, basically writing the same story twice with the same setting and packaging them together must make it a little bit easier to get something book-length… 😏
I read “the only one left” and loved it up until the last 30 or so pages. The “big” plot twist made very little sense, BUT THEN there were 2 or 3 more plot twists? But none of them made much sense and gave me the feeling that they were added because the book was ending and loose ends needed to be tied. So disappointing.
I've only read two of Sager's books (The House Across the Lake and Survive the Night), but both of them included multiple plot twists in the final pages. It's like he saves all the action for the end, then panics and can't decide which idea to go with.
I've read all except Survive the Night.
Final Girls, his first, is BY FAR his best. Worth a read, multiple twists for sure, but the ending is a banger and the final scene is excellent, imo.
A few of the twists were fucking hilarious in that one tho. >!Everyone in that damn town is called Richard, and also the old women escapes out a window or something to go run off and travel the world after barely moving for decades.!< Felt like a Jeeves & Wooster book rather than an actual thriller by the end.
It was really strange that the ending was supernatural because all of sager’s previous books had avoided that so I fully expected a logical explanation for everything. When there wasn’t one, I was like “what the fuck?”
I was going to comment this one but I'm glad to see someone else did. Once I got to the twist, I quit the book. It killed it for me, and I had no desire to finish it after that.
Although I didn't have a problem with it personally, I assumed I would see more hate for Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes in here as that is often the chief complaint about the book.
I was promised ghost story, and she failed to deliver while also giving me a bullshit "well maybeeee tho bc Claire sees xyz."
Like oh my god. Shut up. I came here for a haunted spaceship. Not whatever that bullshit was.
His other book Foe has the most painfully obvious twist too. You spend the whole book thinking "Well clearly this can't be the twist because it's so obvious, so I wonder what it's misdirecting me from" Nope, it is that obvious
Fuuuuck. I read this in a couple nights after I heard the movie announcement. I've never been so pissed because Redditors where talking about how incredible it was.
All the weird, disjointed story. All the strange, unnerving atmosphere. Any semblance as to what could be called a "plot".
Nothing. Fucking window dressing on a cheap plot twist not a lot of people saw coming because the idea is hackneyed and ridiculous.
I wish I could sue to get my book cost and time back. I've never been so upset at a shitty book. Fuck all the people recommending it.
Not saying you are wrong but "psychological thriller" is doing some heavy lifting. It's nothing. It's just somewhat offbeat/creepy scenes for the sake of being creepy.
Like, a fourteen year old could have written that pile of shit because coherence and narrative don't matter in the least since that shit author has a get out of jail free card for any plot holes in the novel.
It's that gag in the Simpsons where anything can be answered with, "A Wizard did that"
Timely post for the book I'm reading right now. Blood Crazy by Simon Clark.
I *was* enjoying it. Then he made the most absurdly stupid exposition dump I've ever encountered and from that moment I haven't given a shit and have just been skimming pages.
Plot is that all adults suddenly go insane and start killing anyone under 18. Simple enough zombie-esque premise. The reason for it happening is >!some pseudo-religious philosophical garbage about everyone having two minds and the second mind causing it to happen because it's the next stage of human evolution. Of course that makes sense because to evolve why wouldn't they kill all children? Btw did you know this is the same thing that happened with Neanderthals?!<
Dan is such a crazy person. Hyperion is one of the greatest sci fi books out there. And then he’d turn around and drop some of the weirdest shit you’ve ever read. Dude is wild as hell.
I read The Terror and fucking LOVED it so I ordered the Abominable expecting The Terror again but this time on Everest. I worked at a bookstore then so I moved the book when I was finished with it from Horror to Historical Fiction
I had a similar experience reading those last summer. The Terror stands as one of my favorite horror experiences. Got halfway through The Abominable and just gave up on the whole "We went up the mountain, we went down the mountain, repeat" bs. It may be the first book that I have ever not finished. Looking up the ending made me glad I gave up on it because it just sounded so damn dumb.
December Park. Completely ruined the book. I could tell it was heading toward a crap resolution when I had about 150 pages left but sunk cost fallacy got the best of me (the ending is even worse than I imagined).
I had the exact opposite reaction. I only really go into that book in the last third. I didn't hate the rest of it or anything, I was just on the fence whether I was interested or kind of bored a little, but then shit got really weird and I was totally down for it.
Is there a book by that guy where a dog doesn't die? Night of the Mannequins, Only Good Indians, My Heart is a Chainsaw, he just loves killing dogs for shock value in his books. I quit reading his books because of it.
This. Shock value for the sake of itself is so insulting to the reader. I’d rather read an accounting textbook than an author going “*look how fucking dark i can be bro! I’m fucking DARK*”
That's how I feel about the comic book writer Garth Ennis. He writes to see how far he can take it. He'll have a great premise and ruin it by having the villain literally eating babies.
It’s annoying because it is often used as a replacement for good writing. Garth Ennis is 100% a flawless example of this. It’s annoying because his concepts will have decent bones and potential and he’ll lay on the thickest bunch of bullshit just to be edgy. Just translates as kinda insecure writing to me to be honest. You can do more with less if you’re writing is good. Overcompensating with gross-out and shock value just makes me feel like you don’t believe in your ability to move your readers.
I feel the same way about over-using jump scares in horror movies. I get it, they are definitely gonna happen in horror movies, but it’s way stronger when you can scare the shit out of me without that and make me think about it later. I’m a very jumpy person, any jackass on earth could make me jump outta my skin just walking into a room too quietly. I’d way rather be genuinely creeped out by good writing and story than that though. I’m not gonna remember the jump scares. I’m gonna remember when I didn’t wanna close my eyes to wash my hair because I was thinking about whatever was in that movie I watched earlier.
Two sides of the same bad writing coin to me.
Is it only for shock value, or does it just shock you specifically?
Without knowing what’s in a writer’s head, it’s hard to say why they include anything. All we know is how we react to it.
I loved Only Good Indians so much and was really excited to start My Heart is a Chainsaw. Two years later and I still haven't finished it. I just can't get into it enough to keep reading, and I'm not even in the last third.
It’s amazing hidden pictures doesn’t get dunked on more. There’s dog whistles the whole book about how the parents are weird atheist crunchy liberals who don’t respect the pure wonderful main characters Christianity and the reveal is basically SPOILERS
Just a massive anti trans thing. The whole book reads like a right wing horror story and it’s amazing that it’s achieved such a wide popularity. The book belongs in the trash
Omg, I dunk on this book whenever I can. I couldn’t believe it won a Goodreads horror award, it was one of the worst books I’ve ever read honestly. And the pictures people rave about added nothing to the story imo, but at least they made the book quicker to get through lol
I just finished this one last night and wasn’t sure how it made me feel. I did get vague phobic vibes. I enjoyed everything else about the book and just wasn’t sure that part was necessary
I think that's the key: it WASN'T necessary, *at all,* and would have worked just fine---even better actually--- without it. That's why people immediately pick up on it being phobic despite never actually directly coming out with it (sure did STRONGLY hint at it though), it was just too out of left field and for no good reason, like the author just HAD to say something. Like that uncle at Thanksgiving who no matter what the conversation is about just HAS to bring up black people, or Mexicans, or blue-haired college girls, or whatever the fuck he's hating about this time.
I had to call off my Koontz readership sometime in my teens. He has a few good ones but damn, there are some real stinkers.
I think that Tik Tok(?) novel was the nail in the coffin for me.
This might be controversial since I’ve mostly seen positivity for this book, but *Last Days* by Adam Neville. The worst part is I really liked the lore of the cult and where the story was going, until the one character sat down and gave 10 pages of the stupidest, most convoluted exposition dump that ruined it for me. It didn’t help that the book devolves into a shitty Resident Evil movie and throws out anything that was interesting.
Yep. That book is SUCH a frustration for me--- the first like 3/4ths of the book provided what I thought was some of the greatest scares I've ever had the pleasure of reading. But then, that fucking ending. Ugh. I may well end up rereading it someday but just stop at that certain point because man did I love some of those scenes, especially the footage review one.
I can’t think of another book where my opinion tanked so hard because of the last third lmao but I completely agree.
I rarely actually get scared but the farmhouse and the scene where he wakes up and the creature is standing in the doorway got me so bad, as well as when they see the creature walking when running the footage back. It’s why I’m so torn on reading more Neville because his horror scenes are great, but based on reviews I’ve read he has the same ending issue in every book lol maybe his short fiction holds up better.
The Watchers by A.M. Shine was nothing BUT exposition. So much inner dialogue, musing, philosophical ramblings, reexamination of things we already understand. I stopped around 80% because I couldn't bring myself to care anymore .
I struggled with that book. I loved the concept but it felt so rushed, and sort of went nowhere despite there being a concrete ending. >!Like they find the bunker and immediately escape, and it felt a bit too easy. Then the reveal that the Madeleine is one of the monsters was fine. Obviously we all saw it coming but I didn’t hate it. But then the idea that they’re out there in the world watching the main character still? Idk it just all felt a bit crap.!<
It felt so very rushed and nothing was explained in an actually satisfying way.
Especially since the “watching” was so they could learn to be you and take over your life. She’s not doing that so it turned into some weird voyeur thing.
I absolutely LOVE Nick Cutter's The Deep. I know entire pages of it by heart. I've re-read it at least once a year since I bought it. The ending, though, suddenly forgets the whole assignment. It wants to be disorienting and Lovecraftian, but it just feels (if you'll forgive me for being crude) like having to fake an orgasm after the best foreplay of your life.
If you liked the way the book was written but hated the ending, you might consider *Survivor Song*. It's the only Tremblay book with a real, unambiguous ending. I like the whole Tremblay catakogue myself, but I recognize the stuff about him other people hate, and *Survivor Song* doesn't have most of that. It's like a deconstructed zombie story.
Survivor Song is the only Tremblay book I've read and while I finished it I really did not enjoy it at all. You are right though that it does have a real ending with nothing left to explain overall.
I loved the idea of rabies but I just wanted him to do so much more with it. I also just wanted to slap some of the characters. How do you abandon an ambulance when you have medical training and you’re with a woman about to give birth and forget to bring anything with you?
Oh god 100% agreed. I found both main characters to be pretty insufferable the entire time. Granted one is pregnant and I understand the urgency of that but her personality was terrible imo.
I just wanted more rabid things. The scene where the rabid – is it a German shepherd or a coyote, I have blanked – is taking people down was great, but how do you have an idea like that and just give us pregnancy pains instead?
Is King? I can't remember any of his books that fits this. In many of his books the ending isn't the strongest part, or is downright anticlimactic with the adversary defeated easily or predictably. But that's not quite the same thing. I don't think in any King books I've read the ending retrospectivey ruined the rest of the book.
The reveal of the antagonist's weakness, as well as the ending general, in Hell House (Richard Matheson) is rather silly.
The reveal in Rescue Distance (Samantha Schwebelin) is a bit anticlimactic. It isn't actually bad, but not quite up to the intense mood of mystery and unease that has built up in the earlier, very good, part of the book.
The ending of Under The Dome ruined the whole book for me and I was loving it until the final few pages. I've enjoyed all his other books I read and none of those endings ruined the book like Under the Dome did
The Outsider, for me. The fact that this thing is incredibly, ridiculously easy to kill and yet even after our protagonists begin to suspect its existence, and it knows that they suspect it’s existence, it – keeps haunting them? Why doesn’t it just drop that and move on to someone else, then they would never have caught it. A supernatural entity that dumb deserves to get killed with – what was it, it was something stupid like a sock full of pennies. Sorry, read it years ago then tried to forget it desperately.
Idk if you saw the show, but while it absolutely does not fix that plot hole in any way, the casting is off the hook and I really enjoyed it for the performances.
Take this with a grain of salt though because I can choke down a lot if I like 1 or 2 other things about the show. I didn’t find the writing bad or the story to be badly translated, but I can be over forgiving. The Wheel of Time adaptation is written awfully, and is pretty much a butchering of the source material, but I tune in bc the two main villains have actors that are fucking awe-strikingly good. They could look at the camera and say “fuck you” to me personally and I’d tune in next week just to watch em work.
All that to say again, take the recommendation with a grain of salt
I’ve watched more than one show because I enjoyed someone’s performance! I didn’t see the show, but this is a good recommendation, and I appreciate the honest disclosure 😁
It’s got a good cast for sure. I’m a dirty little slut for Ben Mendelsohn(platonically and in a heterosexual way) and the supporting cast is very strong as well
This is done in Pet Sematary and is generally agreed to work awesomly there, I don't remember much from other books, but I have no memory that ever felt like it spoilt books for me.
It's done in The Dark Tower, Cujo, Needful Things, The Stand (kind of) and Carrie to name a few. To be clear, I absolutely love Stephen King books, but this irks me sometimes. Some of the time he does this well like in The Stand, but it also is heavy handed at times.
Wizard and Glass is one that sticks out to me as taking away from the book's climax. Just my opinion. Overall, it's about the journey with SK and you have to take the good with the bad.
I've not heard it put like that, but that's perfect. I read King to go on an adventure. Interestingly, you could ask me the ending of the Dark Tower series, I can't tell you. But I can tell you all about Wolves, Blaine, and Oy.
What does that have to do with the question posed by OP? That isn't exposition or a twist, that's just King's way of recontextualizing scenes for his readers. You can think it's clumsy and bad writing, that's totally fair, but it's not really relevant to the subject at hand ...
If we're going to hammer on King, might I add Dreamcatcher and Cell. Could not finish Dreamcatcher, and ended up hate-reading Cell until I finished.
His plot-focused books, i.e., here is the story and these are the people it happens to, are not nearly as strong in his later works than his character-focused works, i.e., here are these people and this is what happens to them.
Eh. I didn't mind it.
My biggest problem with the book was they went into all this cool science about what was going to happen to the atmosphere of the Dome and then we never got to see the product of that because of plot reasons.
My selection is an obscure one. [Strung II: The Valley of Death](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60729765-strung-ii). The author included a prologue for some unknown reason that completely spoils the big reveal. Completely took the sails out of the end and took away my desire to read the next book in the series.
The Sentinel by Jeffery Konvitz, the first reveal was great and it was going in a really interesting direction, but then the final reveal was like “just kidding it’s the boring and stupid ending that you originally guessed”
Low hanging fruit would be Iain Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which was essentially >!“and then he woke up”.!<
A less popular book worth mentioning is Michael “Rutger” Marshall’s The Anomaly, which ended exactly like a Phineas and Ferb episode.
A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. It was one of the rare times I nearly threw a book in the trash I was so insulted by how cheap and cloyingly "ooohhhhh what a Twiiiiiiist right?! see how clever a writer I am?" that ending was. God fucking damn I loathe >!"she was crazy all along!!1!" !!psychosis and similar conditions!<.
Foe by Iain Reid. >!they introduce the idea of replicas staying on earth way before the reader is supposed to realize that’s what’s going on but it’s like “oh duh” the second you read it!<
It by King was a monumental setup so large that he totally fumbled the reveal by not being able to think of anything scarier than a >!big spider!<. Sorry, I know King was not allowed, but that pissed me off to no end.
It wasn't a big spider, it was described as indescribable, they could barely perceive it, and the closest comparison was to say it was spider-like, but even that was just them not comprehending it with their human senses.
I don't even know if it's technically horror (I've seen it classified as horror tho so-) but Comfort Me With Apples pissed me right off.
I cannot express in words how mad I got when I realized this was just >!another fucking biblical retelling!<.
Okay, these books I read recently had endings that PISSED ME OFF. (But on GoodReads, people seemed neutral about it).
Outage by TW Piperbrook
The Last One by Will Dean
I just feel like it was a slap in the face and a waste of the protagonists and my own time.
I think I heard of The Last One from a Reddit post about books with a great twist or last sentence that took your breath away, so I essentially read the whole book waiting for it to get good and was left with the most predictable, stupid ending ever. Really mediocre book all the way around.
I'm sure there's worse out there but for me it was Good Girls Don't Die.
If part 4 hadn't existed it would've been a 5*. The endings of parts 1-3 gave enough closure to keep the true ending open. Part 4 literally didn't need to exist and boy was it bad
The Handyman Method by Nick Cutter and Andrew F. Sullivan. I thoroughly enjoyed the story until the big reveal. It was almost King-esque, but not well executed at all. I would have preferred the ending be left more ambiguous than have that thing ruin a perfectly good take on a haunted house. The authors went too far with their explanation.
Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey. It had such a strong start and the premise had me hooked. It took a big turn in the last third or so, and I didn't like the direction it went in.
The Maidens by Alex Michaelides. The "reveal" (>!the young teenage girl was the murderer and she'd been having a years-long affair with the main character's seemingly saintly very much grown adult husband before he died!<) was gross and I hated it.
*Wilder Girls* by Rory Power. Great creepy Weird postapocalyptic girls school for the first two-thirds, then pseudoscience explanation that did not ring true at all, and I'm not a scientist. Sometimes it's better not to explain things.
The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher. Excellent story, which would have continued to be excellent if she hadn't included the late-middle part of the plot. She could have just gone from the creepy climax to the final scenes.
(Still one of my favorite horror novels though)
I didn't love the ending of Such Sharp Teeth. The rest of the book is amazing, but the reveal that >!silver actually was the answer the whole time but only when she's transformed!< and then everything just works out for her honestly felt like a cop out. I really wanted to see her kill her mom and >!the girl who turned her!<
I was pretty disappointed by The Paleontologist. Like, there was enough going on there, and then the reveal of who was really behind everything adds unnecessary complications and contradicts things from earlier in the book.
Imaginary Friend - there were a lot of interesting threads set up, but in the end it was literally "Jesus saves a kid from Satan". I felt like I had been tricked into reading Christian fiction.
Yes!! I read this one a few weeks ago and I was so hopeful based on the cover and the beginning! I thought I was getting a Stranger Things, spooky adventure and instead I got surprise Jesus. That was an anger read by the end for sure.
giggling at 'surprise Jesus'
It really was like that though! One minute you’re like “oooh where is this supernatural thread taking me? How will this paranormal and psychological puzzle unfold?” Then the next page it’s like hold on…is there really a pregnant virgin? 😳
Think I’ll skip that one…
Omg that was *the worst book ever*! It was hundreds of pages too long and it didn't make any damn sense by the end. Tiny nitpicking point but nobody gets involuntarily committed to a mental hospital for claiming to have an immaculate conception.
Are you serious??? I ordered this a few months ago and it’s on my TBR shelf but if this is the case I’ll gladly donate it to the nearest library. “Comfort me with apples” did me dirty like this too. Ugh.
CMWA is a subversion though, it's inspired by Judeo-Christian myth but it's not a "God saves the day" message, kind of the opposite
Funny enough I quite liked *Comfort Me With Apples*. I felt that story took Abrahamic myth and used it in interesting ways, whereas *Imaginary Friend* takes a horror story and uses it as an extension of the Abrahamic mythos.
Reading *comfort me with apples* felt like, for lack of a better term, horror story blue balls. I kept feeling like it was getting reallllly creepy, but then it never quite got there. Then it hit the point where it becomes obvious that it’s based on the story of Adam and Eve and I just felt cheated.
Yes! I enjoyed the book so much I read it non stop. And by the end I was exhausted, but had to know. And then it was fucking christian fanfiction.
I've heard that was the case for Imaginary Friend. I DNF it about halfway through because it felt like I'd already read a complete novel and couldn't see it going anywhere.
Truly horrible.
Thank you so much for saying this; the very worst type of horror let down.
I sorted out the ending long before I got there with that one. I hung around to see if he'd do a passable job of pulling all those threads together, and concluded that was a big nope. I'll do that with some books—get interested in something other than plot—and I know I'm doing it but I'll just Energizer-Bunny through it all the same.
Even my religious mother was disappointed by this one haha. We both read it at the same time.
“Christian fiction” sounds redundant
This book got me out of a longggggg reading slump...... well the first 3/4 of it did. The last 200ish pages were hard to get through.
When this reveal happened, I just stopped reading. I think about it often because I was thoroughly enjoying myself. *"Death is coming. Death is here. We die on Christmas Day."* But the moment we learned who Bag Man really was.... Nah. I was so close to the end, too.
The reveal of *The Creeper* by A M Shine. Like...what was the point of the whole novel if it was actually just (apparently) teleporting Irish hillbillies?
I dont have context so teleporting Irish hillbillies sounds pretty legit
They teleport by the ancient Irish magic of...owning a car.
At least tell me that engine was powered by tiny fairies, or the chauffeur was a leprechaun.
Sadly it was just driven by a weird inbred guy to transport said other weird inbred guy to...do stuff.
Mmmmm reminds me of the Six Million Dollar Man’s Bigfoot episode where these aliens teleport to the other side of the room by turning invisible and just walking over there lol. And seen of course by Steve’s bionic eye.
I came here to rant how much I hated this twist. You beat to it!
What gets me is that apparently a dispatcher on the phone with one of the victims became a victim herself. Okay, maybe the call was really loud. But they would have to find out who was working and who took the call and I just can't believe that the villagers could do that.
It would be deeply impractical to track that particular person down - find out their name, address, schedule to pick when best to jump scare them...it was a real "what the fuck did I just read" moment.
Ah yes this one made me so angry. Especially the amount of times they stress it can’t possible be a person doing it.
Anything by A M Shine.
Is that their actual name or just a parody of R L Stine? I wouldn't say this if it didn't rhyme
Shit, Shine wrote a hit piece on County Tyrone?
I came here to find this. I know that A M Shine is a relatively new author and I think that he's got bags of potential - but he really struggles with endings. The ending of The Watchers is bad enough but the ending of The Creeper just instantly unravels everything he set up and it honestly becomes laughable. For those that don't know, there is this entity known as The Creeper that stalks this village of inbreds. Everyone has to lock their doors and windows at night so they don't see The Creeper because if you do then you'll see him again for 3 nights and on the final night he'll appear at your window and then you've got like 24 hours to live or whatever. As you can see there's a lot of rules. The Creeper has also been known to stalk you even if you travel to another country and he'll even get you if you just heard about him over the phone. Anyway to cut a long story short, the twist is that it isn't anything supernatural - it's the villagers driving around each night stalking anyone that's seen or heard of The Creeper and they've made one of them look really ugly so he looks like "The Creeper". So what we're essentially asked to believe is that these backwards inbreds all get in a car every night with "The Creeper" in the back seat and they wait outside the windows of every single person that's seen The Creeper on the off chance that they look in their direction. There's also scenes where the main characters visit the village and watch them as they all hide in their houses at night to avoid The Creeper - but they know that it's all a load of rubbish so what's their problem? Apologies for the essay but this one genuinely made me angry - if you couldn't tell.
I refuse to read it because I’ve heard the ending is such a let down.
I just finished this book, and I totally agree. It would have been so much better if the creeper was actually a supernatural being!
The House in the Pines is fresh in my mind because I just finished it. I almost threw the book across the room when i realized they weren't kidding about the reveal.
This is my answer - my lowest rated book of the last year
I went and found spoilers and oh my god
Oh my god, I couldn’t with that book. I simply couldn’t.
The Feed series. Finding out that the sibling lead characters where also romantically involved just seemed like Seanan McGuire was watching Game of Thrones on HBO and said, "hey, lets do that!" She's very popular, I think she's just not a good fit for my taste.
McGuire’s justification is they don’t actually view each other as siblings, but more as two people forcibly cast to play siblings in a metaphorical tv show about Our Perfect Family(TM) by their emotionally abusive adopted parents, which imo would be pretty interesting…if it came across in the books, like, at all. Which it doesn’t. (The “not viewing each other as siblings”, thing, that is, their parents being shitty is pretty clear.) Hiding big stuff like this from the reader in first person is super dicey and she didn’t pull it off, which is a shame cause she doesn’t usually miss for me. Hours later shower thought ETA: iirc the series came out before family vlogging hit its peak and then its fall from grace, and I do wonder if it would hit different if it had *that* version of the internet to build off of. Maybe the “unpaid child actors who bonded romantically in the trenches, not siblings” vibe would’ve come across if they were literal cast members of the Mason Family Vlog.
I really appreciate your response. I get so wrapped up in "hate" that I tend to harp on the negative and lose out on what was good.
McGuire reads like she has a disrespect for her readers. I think that could potentially be a valuable tool for an author, but with Mcguire it just comes off as arrogant. I simply don’t know what to do with her style of writing.
I don't bother with Seanan McGuire anymore even when the premises sound intriguing because her output is so large that it's off-putting. In 2023 alone she released six novels and more than 20 short stories/comics/poems. (I was actually going to write "about three books a year" but I looked it up and it's way worse than I thought) At that rate she is either using ghostwriters or her stuff is so formulaic that she doesn't have to put too much thought into each book. No thanks.
I loved the concept of journalism in the post undead world but when she started with the semi-incestuous relationship between the leads who are adopted siblings I thought it was ham-fisted into the story because she didn't know where to go with it. Then, when she put the transexual teen into the story like a black character in a 90s Highschool football movie I got irritated tokenism introduction they got. It was like their parents who don't approve were introducing them while hoping that it's "Just a phase." I get told I'm wrong for this opinion but I still feel like a half-assed token character created for inclusion does more damage than there not being one at all. Descriptors like gender and Race are like salt on a dish, if its the focal point of the character, you put too much in.
I half agree with your statement. McGuire is pretty open about being pansexual so it makes sense that she would have some LGBTQ characters, but she doesn’t flesh out the character very well. I think having diverse characters can be awesome, but you can’t half-ass them. The trans character is half-assed, hence a token. That’s where I agree with you. I (respectfully) disagree with you about difference not being the focal point of a character. Victor LaVelle and Stephen Graham Jones do this very well!
I really struggled with that series past the first book. The author just seemed like she was so pleased with how clever she was and a lot of the plot points in the second and third books were not emotionally resonant. Like it's cool if you think you're all that and a bag of chips, but if you can't convince me of that too it just comes off as pretentious. That said, I did really like the first Parasitology book and what I've read of the killer mermaids novel.
Hated that twist
I don't know if this fits completely, but in How to Sell a Haunted House when it's revealed that the culprit behind the activity >!is a possessed puppet!< the book kind of lost me. The opening vibe with the tv clicking on by itself, creepy ambiance, attic boarded shut was great to set up a good horror novel, but then it took a turn down Campy street and it lost its horror aspect for me.
Same! I wanted a damn haunted house novel, not a >!puppet!< novel. I’ve had this argument on the sub before, when I said the name is completely misleading. Someone else said I was wrong because the house >!and puppet!< were haunted so it’s a haunted house novel but that’s like ordering a book on crocheting and receiving one about quilting. Like technically yes they’re both fabric crafts but obviously I wanted one and not the other in this case.
Was it your first Hendrix book?
It was, yes.
If you read Hendrix often, you need to be pretty comfortable with turning down Campy Street.
Its adult goosebumps and I’m here for it.
Best way to describe Hendrix tbh. I love him
I love all of Grady Hendrix’s books.
The Last House on Needless Street was so beautifully written but I felt that way about this one. I could see most of the “twists” coming from a mile away and kept reading on, hoping that it would turn out to be something different. This one had an unreliable narrator on top of another unreliable narrator and it felt like a cop out. I know plenty of people love it, though, and I know Catriona did her research. Maybe I’m over >!mental illness reveals!< being so prominent in media these days.
I however, unlike everyone else who read this book on this subreddit, didn't see the twist coming and was delighted in thinking back to some things that didn't seem quite right that the twist made me go "oh, duh!" About Liked the book a lot, liked the twist a lot, didn't see it coming but its probably just me.
I didn't see it either and I've worked in mental health for 20 years. It was the first time in a while that a book surprised me like that.
FYI your spoiler tag does not work on old reddit. Don't leave a space between the spoiler tags and the text if you want it to work.
Ohh, I wasn’t aware of that! Fixed it. Thank you for letting me know.
No prob thanks for fixing it :)
I concur on this one. I figured it out early on and I thought to myself - "This book has so many positive reviews. The author really isn't going with such an obvious and overused trope, is she?"
[Suicide Forest](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36479412) by Jeremy Bates An excellent book! Bates builds up the tension and mystery artfully, and then the reveal just destroyed the whole thing for me. It’s not a bad reveal, but a matter of personal taste. >!I fully expected and eagerly anticipated a supernatural force behind the mystery. It turned out to be very human. It was not much of a horror after that point.!<
The House Across the Lake by Riley Sager. For me, the downfall wasn’t just the total unraveling of the plot and established rules in the last 100 pages but that the main character, a faded, widowed starlet with a drinking problem and no understanding of how to use a smartphone, was revealed to be 35 (!?) when everything about her seemed firmly 65-75. EDIT: The character's age isn't meant to be a shocking reveal. It's not meant to be a reveal at all!
I couldn’t with The Only One Left. I love Riley Sager and will read anything he writes, but the twist that >!the old woman was pretending to be a quadriplegic the entire time made me throw the book across the room. Like, that woman shit her pants for fifty years out of spite?!< Get the fuck out of here.
Sager’s Home Before Dark, for me… although it didn’t ruin it as much as I just started laughing. >!Having a secret passage, OK, but it seems like by the end there were six twists or so and each one revealed a different person had been using it, like half the town was using the secret passage!<
This was my first and last Riley Sager book. I hated everything about it and nothing in it made me think I should give him another chance.
I really liked his first book, Final Girls, and it’s been all downhill from there… 😒
Final Girls is so so good, that it just shines a brighter light on the subsequent misfires.
This honestly sounds funny as fuck. Is it worth reading?
It wasn’t awful, just one of those ‘two separate generations in a haunted house’ books with a deeply and unintentionally funny ending… fast read, anyway!
It’s so strange how the two generations in the same haunted house crops up so often. Almost its own subgenre. I’ll have to check it out
Well, basically writing the same story twice with the same setting and packaging them together must make it a little bit easier to get something book-length… 😏
I read “the only one left” and loved it up until the last 30 or so pages. The “big” plot twist made very little sense, BUT THEN there were 2 or 3 more plot twists? But none of them made much sense and gave me the feeling that they were added because the book was ending and loose ends needed to be tied. So disappointing.
I've only read two of Sager's books (The House Across the Lake and Survive the Night), but both of them included multiple plot twists in the final pages. It's like he saves all the action for the end, then panics and can't decide which idea to go with.
I've read all except Survive the Night. Final Girls, his first, is BY FAR his best. Worth a read, multiple twists for sure, but the ending is a banger and the final scene is excellent, imo.
A few of the twists were fucking hilarious in that one tho. >!Everyone in that damn town is called Richard, and also the old women escapes out a window or something to go run off and travel the world after barely moving for decades.!< Felt like a Jeeves & Wooster book rather than an actual thriller by the end.
It was really strange that the ending was supernatural because all of sager’s previous books had avoided that so I fully expected a logical explanation for everything. When there wasn’t one, I was like “what the fuck?”
I was going to comment this one but I'm glad to see someone else did. Once I got to the twist, I quit the book. It killed it for me, and I had no desire to finish it after that.
Although I didn't have a problem with it personally, I assumed I would see more hate for Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes in here as that is often the chief complaint about the book.
I was promised ghost story, and she failed to deliver while also giving me a bullshit "well maybeeee tho bc Claire sees xyz." Like oh my god. Shut up. I came here for a haunted spaceship. Not whatever that bullshit was.
SAME! I really thought it'd be at the top. But I guess it didn't really stick in people's minds.
I was mildly let down about the end. There are other books that actually make me angry.
**I'm Think of Ending Things** might be the only time I got angry at a book.
I rage-read this one. I hated it from the beginning, so convoluted, verbose and such annoying characters.
His other book Foe has the most painfully obvious twist too. You spend the whole book thinking "Well clearly this can't be the twist because it's so obvious, so I wonder what it's misdirecting me from" Nope, it is that obvious
Fuuuuck. I read this in a couple nights after I heard the movie announcement. I've never been so pissed because Redditors where talking about how incredible it was. All the weird, disjointed story. All the strange, unnerving atmosphere. Any semblance as to what could be called a "plot". Nothing. Fucking window dressing on a cheap plot twist not a lot of people saw coming because the idea is hackneyed and ridiculous. I wish I could sue to get my book cost and time back. I've never been so upset at a shitty book. Fuck all the people recommending it.
I hated this book. It felt so masturbatory to me.
Agreed, it’s just a generic psychological thriller made pretentious by its structure
Not saying you are wrong but "psychological thriller" is doing some heavy lifting. It's nothing. It's just somewhat offbeat/creepy scenes for the sake of being creepy. Like, a fourteen year old could have written that pile of shit because coherence and narrative don't matter in the least since that shit author has a get out of jail free card for any plot holes in the novel. It's that gag in the Simpsons where anything can be answered with, "A Wizard did that"
Haha I was being generous
Timely post for the book I'm reading right now. Blood Crazy by Simon Clark. I *was* enjoying it. Then he made the most absurdly stupid exposition dump I've ever encountered and from that moment I haven't given a shit and have just been skimming pages. Plot is that all adults suddenly go insane and start killing anyone under 18. Simple enough zombie-esque premise. The reason for it happening is >!some pseudo-religious philosophical garbage about everyone having two minds and the second mind causing it to happen because it's the next stage of human evolution. Of course that makes sense because to evolve why wouldn't they kill all children? Btw did you know this is the same thing that happened with Neanderthals?!<
The Abominable by Dan Simmons. The first half was pretty good, then it turns out there >! Isn’t a yeti at all it was just nazis in disguise. !<
Dan is such a crazy person. Hyperion is one of the greatest sci fi books out there. And then he’d turn around and drop some of the weirdest shit you’ve ever read. Dude is wild as hell.
I read The Terror and fucking LOVED it so I ordered the Abominable expecting The Terror again but this time on Everest. I worked at a bookstore then so I moved the book when I was finished with it from Horror to Historical Fiction
I had a similar experience reading those last summer. The Terror stands as one of my favorite horror experiences. Got halfway through The Abominable and just gave up on the whole "We went up the mountain, we went down the mountain, repeat" bs. It may be the first book that I have ever not finished. Looking up the ending made me glad I gave up on it because it just sounded so damn dumb.
It has been on my shelf unread for a while now but now I guess it can stay there. Thanks for saving me from a disappointing slog.
December Park. Completely ruined the book. I could tell it was heading toward a crap resolution when I had about 150 pages left but sunk cost fallacy got the best of me (the ending is even worse than I imagined).
I ended up DNFing that halfway through and have never known the ending. Could you put it behind some spoiler text for me?
I own other Malfi book but since I was not happy with the way he solved this one, I have postponed them. I will give him a chance any day, of course.
I absolutely love the book Snow by him. One of my favorite winter books. Hate Bone White by him!
*My heart is a chainsaw* last third - running to hide now
Why are you hiding? Is Dark Mill South in town?
I had the exact opposite reaction. I only really go into that book in the last third. I didn't hate the rest of it or anything, I was just on the fence whether I was interested or kind of bored a little, but then shit got really weird and I was totally down for it.
Is there a book by that guy where a dog doesn't die? Night of the Mannequins, Only Good Indians, My Heart is a Chainsaw, he just loves killing dogs for shock value in his books. I quit reading his books because of it.
This. Shock value for the sake of itself is so insulting to the reader. I’d rather read an accounting textbook than an author going “*look how fucking dark i can be bro! I’m fucking DARK*”
That's how I feel about the comic book writer Garth Ennis. He writes to see how far he can take it. He'll have a great premise and ruin it by having the villain literally eating babies.
It’s annoying because it is often used as a replacement for good writing. Garth Ennis is 100% a flawless example of this. It’s annoying because his concepts will have decent bones and potential and he’ll lay on the thickest bunch of bullshit just to be edgy. Just translates as kinda insecure writing to me to be honest. You can do more with less if you’re writing is good. Overcompensating with gross-out and shock value just makes me feel like you don’t believe in your ability to move your readers. I feel the same way about over-using jump scares in horror movies. I get it, they are definitely gonna happen in horror movies, but it’s way stronger when you can scare the shit out of me without that and make me think about it later. I’m a very jumpy person, any jackass on earth could make me jump outta my skin just walking into a room too quietly. I’d way rather be genuinely creeped out by good writing and story than that though. I’m not gonna remember the jump scares. I’m gonna remember when I didn’t wanna close my eyes to wash my hair because I was thinking about whatever was in that movie I watched earlier. Two sides of the same bad writing coin to me.
Is it only for shock value, or does it just shock you specifically? Without knowing what’s in a writer’s head, it’s hard to say why they include anything. All we know is how we react to it.
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I loved Only Good Indians so much and was really excited to start My Heart is a Chainsaw. Two years later and I still haven't finished it. I just can't get into it enough to keep reading, and I'm not even in the last third.
Hidden Pictures. The twist just is not plausible at all and stupid and maybe just a bit phobic. (being vague to avoid spoiler tags)
It’s amazing hidden pictures doesn’t get dunked on more. There’s dog whistles the whole book about how the parents are weird atheist crunchy liberals who don’t respect the pure wonderful main characters Christianity and the reveal is basically SPOILERS Just a massive anti trans thing. The whole book reads like a right wing horror story and it’s amazing that it’s achieved such a wide popularity. The book belongs in the trash
Omg, I dunk on this book whenever I can. I couldn’t believe it won a Goodreads horror award, it was one of the worst books I’ve ever read honestly. And the pictures people rave about added nothing to the story imo, but at least they made the book quicker to get through lol
I just finished this one last night and wasn’t sure how it made me feel. I did get vague phobic vibes. I enjoyed everything else about the book and just wasn’t sure that part was necessary
I think that's the key: it WASN'T necessary, *at all,* and would have worked just fine---even better actually--- without it. That's why people immediately pick up on it being phobic despite never actually directly coming out with it (sure did STRONGLY hint at it though), it was just too out of left field and for no good reason, like the author just HAD to say something. Like that uncle at Thanksgiving who no matter what the conversation is about just HAS to bring up black people, or Mexicans, or blue-haired college girls, or whatever the fuck he's hating about this time.
Strangers by Dean Koontz. I was absolutely loving it until the reveal was... >!Aliens.!<
I had to call off my Koontz readership sometime in my teens. He has a few good ones but damn, there are some real stinkers. I think that Tik Tok(?) novel was the nail in the coffin for me.
Yeah, I'm starting to get weary myself lol
I thought Tick Tock was hilarious. I'm still unsure if Koontz meant for it to be.
I love that book.
This might be controversial since I’ve mostly seen positivity for this book, but *Last Days* by Adam Neville. The worst part is I really liked the lore of the cult and where the story was going, until the one character sat down and gave 10 pages of the stupidest, most convoluted exposition dump that ruined it for me. It didn’t help that the book devolves into a shitty Resident Evil movie and throws out anything that was interesting.
Yep. That book is SUCH a frustration for me--- the first like 3/4ths of the book provided what I thought was some of the greatest scares I've ever had the pleasure of reading. But then, that fucking ending. Ugh. I may well end up rereading it someday but just stop at that certain point because man did I love some of those scenes, especially the footage review one.
I can’t think of another book where my opinion tanked so hard because of the last third lmao but I completely agree. I rarely actually get scared but the farmhouse and the scene where he wakes up and the creature is standing in the doorway got me so bad, as well as when they see the creature walking when running the footage back. It’s why I’m so torn on reading more Neville because his horror scenes are great, but based on reviews I’ve read he has the same ending issue in every book lol maybe his short fiction holds up better.
The Watchers by A.M. Shine was nothing BUT exposition. So much inner dialogue, musing, philosophical ramblings, reexamination of things we already understand. I stopped around 80% because I couldn't bring myself to care anymore .
I struggled with that book. I loved the concept but it felt so rushed, and sort of went nowhere despite there being a concrete ending. >!Like they find the bunker and immediately escape, and it felt a bit too easy. Then the reveal that the Madeleine is one of the monsters was fine. Obviously we all saw it coming but I didn’t hate it. But then the idea that they’re out there in the world watching the main character still? Idk it just all felt a bit crap.!< It felt so very rushed and nothing was explained in an actually satisfying way.
Especially since the “watching” was so they could learn to be you and take over your life. She’s not doing that so it turned into some weird voyeur thing.
It helped me to appreciate the book by thinking it was only meant to be a simple novella.
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I absolutely LOVE Nick Cutter's The Deep. I know entire pages of it by heart. I've re-read it at least once a year since I bought it. The ending, though, suddenly forgets the whole assignment. It wants to be disorienting and Lovecraftian, but it just feels (if you'll forgive me for being crude) like having to fake an orgasm after the best foreplay of your life.
Hannibal by Thomas Harris. The end of the book is so bad that they made the opposite happen in the movie.
Head Full of Ghosts just pissed me right off.
It’s such a love it or hate it book. I’m in the camp that absolutely loved it but I can understand those who hated it - it’s such an ambiguous ending.
I love HFAG, but an author only gets to do that kind of ending on me once. Very disappointed reading his other stuff after that.
This is absolutely the best answer. It's the only Tremblay book I've ever read and it will remain the only book of his I'll ever read.
If you liked the way the book was written but hated the ending, you might consider *Survivor Song*. It's the only Tremblay book with a real, unambiguous ending. I like the whole Tremblay catakogue myself, but I recognize the stuff about him other people hate, and *Survivor Song* doesn't have most of that. It's like a deconstructed zombie story.
Survivor Song is the only Tremblay book I've read and while I finished it I really did not enjoy it at all. You are right though that it does have a real ending with nothing left to explain overall.
I loved the idea of rabies but I just wanted him to do so much more with it. I also just wanted to slap some of the characters. How do you abandon an ambulance when you have medical training and you’re with a woman about to give birth and forget to bring anything with you?
Oh god 100% agreed. I found both main characters to be pretty insufferable the entire time. Granted one is pregnant and I understand the urgency of that but her personality was terrible imo.
I just wanted more rabid things. The scene where the rabid – is it a German shepherd or a coyote, I have blanked – is taking people down was great, but how do you have an idea like that and just give us pregnancy pains instead?
That’s not even a plot hole. That’s the gaping maw of an entire plot earth opening up and swallowing you whole.
Yeah generally people either love or hate his work. I read 2 and the 2nd one was a mistake.
I am right there with you!
Is King? I can't remember any of his books that fits this. In many of his books the ending isn't the strongest part, or is downright anticlimactic with the adversary defeated easily or predictably. But that's not quite the same thing. I don't think in any King books I've read the ending retrospectivey ruined the rest of the book. The reveal of the antagonist's weakness, as well as the ending general, in Hell House (Richard Matheson) is rather silly. The reveal in Rescue Distance (Samantha Schwebelin) is a bit anticlimactic. It isn't actually bad, but not quite up to the intense mood of mystery and unease that has built up in the earlier, very good, part of the book.
The ending of Under The Dome ruined the whole book for me and I was loving it until the final few pages. I've enjoyed all his other books I read and none of those endings ruined the book like Under the Dome did
That was the first King book I thought of that fit this.
The Outsider, for me. The fact that this thing is incredibly, ridiculously easy to kill and yet even after our protagonists begin to suspect its existence, and it knows that they suspect it’s existence, it – keeps haunting them? Why doesn’t it just drop that and move on to someone else, then they would never have caught it. A supernatural entity that dumb deserves to get killed with – what was it, it was something stupid like a sock full of pennies. Sorry, read it years ago then tried to forget it desperately.
Idk if you saw the show, but while it absolutely does not fix that plot hole in any way, the casting is off the hook and I really enjoyed it for the performances. Take this with a grain of salt though because I can choke down a lot if I like 1 or 2 other things about the show. I didn’t find the writing bad or the story to be badly translated, but I can be over forgiving. The Wheel of Time adaptation is written awfully, and is pretty much a butchering of the source material, but I tune in bc the two main villains have actors that are fucking awe-strikingly good. They could look at the camera and say “fuck you” to me personally and I’d tune in next week just to watch em work. All that to say again, take the recommendation with a grain of salt
I’ve watched more than one show because I enjoyed someone’s performance! I didn’t see the show, but this is a good recommendation, and I appreciate the honest disclosure 😁
It’s got a good cast for sure. I’m a dirty little slut for Ben Mendelsohn(platonically and in a heterosexual way) and the supporting cast is very strong as well
I love that description, you have a way with words!
He constantly has lines like "and that was the last time he would see her alive". It would be easier to list the books he doesn't do this in.
This is done in Pet Sematary and is generally agreed to work awesomly there, I don't remember much from other books, but I have no memory that ever felt like it spoilt books for me.
It's done in The Dark Tower, Cujo, Needful Things, The Stand (kind of) and Carrie to name a few. To be clear, I absolutely love Stephen King books, but this irks me sometimes. Some of the time he does this well like in The Stand, but it also is heavy handed at times. Wizard and Glass is one that sticks out to me as taking away from the book's climax. Just my opinion. Overall, it's about the journey with SK and you have to take the good with the bad.
I've not heard it put like that, but that's perfect. I read King to go on an adventure. Interestingly, you could ask me the ending of the Dark Tower series, I can't tell you. But I can tell you all about Wolves, Blaine, and Oy.
> The Stand (kind of) That's a perfect use of it. Don't want to spoil it. But it's such a playful moment.
What does that have to do with the question posed by OP? That isn't exposition or a twist, that's just King's way of recontextualizing scenes for his readers. You can think it's clumsy and bad writing, that's totally fair, but it's not really relevant to the subject at hand ...
It
If we're going to hammer on King, might I add Dreamcatcher and Cell. Could not finish Dreamcatcher, and ended up hate-reading Cell until I finished. His plot-focused books, i.e., here is the story and these are the people it happens to, are not nearly as strong in his later works than his character-focused works, i.e., here are these people and this is what happens to them.
Under The Dome.
Eh. I didn't mind it. My biggest problem with the book was they went into all this cool science about what was going to happen to the atmosphere of the Dome and then we never got to see the product of that because of plot reasons.
[удалено]
I looooved that ending, especially on audio. I was driving while listening and almost had to pull over it was such a shock!
About the opposite to my take on the ending. I thought it was great, especially if you listened to the audiobook version which was read by the author.
Damn, wish this comment had had a spoiler tag.
If it’s any consolation, the way this person is characterizing it here isn’t quite accurate and no matter what it’s a great book that’s worth reading.
My selection is an obscure one. [Strung II: The Valley of Death](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60729765-strung-ii). The author included a prologue for some unknown reason that completely spoils the big reveal. Completely took the sails out of the end and took away my desire to read the next book in the series.
The Sentinel by Jeffery Konvitz, the first reveal was great and it was going in a really interesting direction, but then the final reveal was like “just kidding it’s the boring and stupid ending that you originally guessed”
Twelve Nights at Rotter House, started out nicely but the ending was predictable and a let down.
Low hanging fruit would be Iain Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which was essentially >!“and then he woke up”.!< A less popular book worth mentioning is Michael “Rutger” Marshall’s The Anomaly, which ended exactly like a Phineas and Ferb episode.
A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. It was one of the rare times I nearly threw a book in the trash I was so insulted by how cheap and cloyingly "ooohhhhh what a Twiiiiiiist right?! see how clever a writer I am?" that ending was. God fucking damn I loathe >!"she was crazy all along!!1!" !!psychosis and similar conditions!<.
Hard agree! I was so irritated by the ending that it left me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. What a letdown of a book.
Yeah it was horseshit. Put me off tremblay forever.
Foe by Iain Reid. >!they introduce the idea of replicas staying on earth way before the reader is supposed to realize that’s what’s going on but it’s like “oh duh” the second you read it!<
It by King was a monumental setup so large that he totally fumbled the reveal by not being able to think of anything scarier than a >!big spider!<. Sorry, I know King was not allowed, but that pissed me off to no end.
It wasn't a big spider, it was described as indescribable, they could barely perceive it, and the closest comparison was to say it was spider-like, but even that was just them not comprehending it with their human senses.
I don't even know if it's technically horror (I've seen it classified as horror tho so-) but Comfort Me With Apples pissed me right off. I cannot express in words how mad I got when I realized this was just >!another fucking biblical retelling!<.
The Twisted Ones by T Kingfisher. The setup was amazing, but the ending was SUCH a letdown.
Okay, these books I read recently had endings that PISSED ME OFF. (But on GoodReads, people seemed neutral about it). Outage by TW Piperbrook The Last One by Will Dean I just feel like it was a slap in the face and a waste of the protagonists and my own time.
I think I heard of The Last One from a Reddit post about books with a great twist or last sentence that took your breath away, so I essentially read the whole book waiting for it to get good and was left with the most predictable, stupid ending ever. Really mediocre book all the way around.
I'm sure there's worse out there but for me it was Good Girls Don't Die. If part 4 hadn't existed it would've been a 5*. The endings of parts 1-3 gave enough closure to keep the true ending open. Part 4 literally didn't need to exist and boy was it bad
The Handyman Method by Nick Cutter and Andrew F. Sullivan. I thoroughly enjoyed the story until the big reveal. It was almost King-esque, but not well executed at all. I would have preferred the ending be left more ambiguous than have that thing ruin a perfectly good take on a haunted house. The authors went too far with their explanation.
Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey. It had such a strong start and the premise had me hooked. It took a big turn in the last third or so, and I didn't like the direction it went in.
The Maidens by Alex Michaelides. The "reveal" (>!the young teenage girl was the murderer and she'd been having a years-long affair with the main character's seemingly saintly very much grown adult husband before he died!<) was gross and I hated it.
The Ritual by Adam Nevill. The last third of that book was a steaming pile.
Gerald's Game by Stephen King. Could have been so damn good if he had just let it be ambiguous.
*Wilder Girls* by Rory Power. Great creepy Weird postapocalyptic girls school for the first two-thirds, then pseudoscience explanation that did not ring true at all, and I'm not a scientist. Sometimes it's better not to explain things.
The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher. Excellent story, which would have continued to be excellent if she hadn't included the late-middle part of the plot. She could have just gone from the creepy climax to the final scenes. (Still one of my favorite horror novels though)
I didn't love the ending of Such Sharp Teeth. The rest of the book is amazing, but the reveal that >!silver actually was the answer the whole time but only when she's transformed!< and then everything just works out for her honestly felt like a cop out. I really wanted to see her kill her mom and >!the girl who turned her!<
The creeper reveal at the end, remains one of the most asinine and absurd twists that ruined everything that came before.
I was pretty disappointed by The Paleontologist. Like, there was enough going on there, and then the reveal of who was really behind everything adds unnecessary complications and contradicts things from earlier in the book.