Before there was movies, books is pretty infamous for having bizarre and incomprehensible endings.
- 1Q84: Tengo and Aomame make it out of 1Q84, but where they end up is not quite like how Aomame remembers the 1984 she used to know.
- Older Than Feudalism: The Aeneid is an ancient example of this: the story literally ends with Aeneas killing Turnus and Turnus going to Hell. Virgil himself was unsatisfied with the ending and always saw it as incomplete, but was prevented from changing the story by the freakin' Emperor of Rome himself. It's also assuming that the fact that he Died During Production wasn't at fault, and that the relevant pages aren't just missing, as happens with much ancient literature.
- Animorphs' ending is mostly a Diabolus ex Machina, but it's also a decidedly strange one. Having tied up the series' main plot, the latter half of the final book deals with Ax going missing and the others, minus Cassie, going into space to find him. In the last three pages we meet "The One," who shapeshifts into Ax and a few other forms, seems to know who Jake isnote and is worshiped by the remaining Yeerks. Jake orders them to ram the Blade ship, and the story ends. K. A. Applegate has never explained it and Jossed any fan attempt to make it make sense in light of previous events.
- One of Dave Barry's books, in the midst of his trademark wonky comedic observations, suddenly shifts into a serious romance plot about a woman moving towards having an affair — portrayed sympathetically, at that. This has next to nothing to do with the chapter it's supposed to be the conclusion for, and is also a bit of a BLAM.
- The Bible has the Book of Daniel, which is chronologically the last in the Hebrew version, starts off normally enough, with famous stories like the fiery furnace, the writing on the wall, and the lion's den in the first half. The last half consists of four very confusing prophetic visions that seem to be about world events over the next few centuries.
- There's also the Book of Revelation, the last book in the Bible. Its contents are so strange that theologians have been arguing about what it means for thousands of years. Theories include it being a metaphor for the reign of Nero, a prediction of future events (with the various beasts and disasters either being literal or metaphorical), or an allegory for the liturgical practices of the church. Some even suggest that the author, one John of Patmos, was high when he wrote it, as the island he was living on at the time had an abundance of psychedelic morning glory plants.
- The Narnia books end this way, although the ending makes sense if you treat it as the very heavy-handed Christian allegory that it is (in fact, it makes a great deal more sense than the story it's a reworking of). Read the summary here
. - Croatian novel The Devil's Eye is a pretty standard teen-horror story; a teenage hero must stop an evil demon that's killing his classmates... and the whole thing ends with him turning into a girl for some reason, with abso-friggin'-lutely nothing resolved. And the author's response? "The ending is whatever you think it might be." Yeah, thanks.
- Science-fiction author Philip K. Dick pretty much made a career out of this and Mind Screw:
- Ubik: It's stated that the reality being experienced by Joe Chip for most of the book was how he perceived 'half-life' (a form of cryonic suspension) after he was killed in an explosion. His boss Runciter, who survived, has been trying to get through to him, and one sign of this is Runciter's head appearing on coins. Then, in the last chapter, the viewpoint switches to Runciter, alive, in the world outside... who begins to find Joe Chip's head on his coins.
- "Faith Of Our Fathers" might be Philip K. Dick's most confounding story. Is it a satire of Communist society? An exploration of the true meaning of religion? Or a role reversal of LSD culture? Who can tell? The great Communist leader is actually God in human form, and you can only see his true form(s) (a series of grotesque monstrosities) when you take Thorazine, an antipsychotic medication that was used as an "antidote" to LSD (to end bad trips).
- The Man in the High Castle ends a book about an Alternate History America after the Axis won WWII with... the characters discovering they're fictional.
- The ending also implies that we, the readers, are from a fictional timeline as well, since the war in the novel-within-a-novel, which the I Ching implies is true, plays itself out differently than our historical reality.
- The Difference Engine just abruptly stops and then there's a long stretch of seemingly random snippets of nothing.
- Doctor Who Expanded Universe:
- The short story anthology Short Trips and Sidesteps contains one long-running story ("Special Occasions"), broken up into four parts with each part written by a different author, about the Fourth Doctor and Romana. The first three stories show them celebrating K-9's birthday, Valentine's Day and Christmas, all in a cute Original Flavour W.A.F.F. style. The final story starts with the Fourth Doctor ruminating about Romana and Christmas, going through a pile of dolls, before, in the last few paragraphs, suddenly being transformed into a nightmarish living puppet being forced to watch a flickering film and succumbing to the void.
- The final Doctor Who Missing Adventures novel The Well-Mannered War by Gareth Roberts, is (as was typical for Roberts) a fairly standard Fourth Doctor and Romana story. (In fact it's relentlessly traditional, doing its best to look like a Target novelisation of a TV story that doesn't exist — the online version takes this further.) And then it ends with the Black Guardian suddenly appearing to tell the Doctor he manipulated everything to present the Doctor with a Sadistic Choice, and the Doctor deciding to Take a Third Option by leaving the universe forever, possibly ending up in the Land of Fiction, where Romana comments they'd be "fictional characters, not real people". It reads very much like an attempt to inflict Semi-Canon Discontinuity on the JNT era (except Roberts says it wasn't), or possibly pre-emptive Semi-Canon Discontinuity on the upcoming BBC Books.
- Doom would make Studio Gainax proud by having two such endings:
- Fly and Arlene finally return to Earth after nearly five hundred years, hot in pursuit of the Newbie/Resuscitator ship planning on "fixing" humanity. The enemy never arrives and they never find out why. They land at the rebuilt Salt Lake City Tabernacle where an AI construct of Jill is waiting. She confirms their identities and welcomes them inside to receive a gift: a teenage clone of Jill and a black box on a card table with a card reading "Albert". The end.
Albert! Albert?! I didn't know what to say, so, Goddamn it, I decided to just shut up and be a Marine. Semper fi, Mac... I know when I'm beat!- A duplicate Fly and Arlene slog through the Deimos facility looking for a backdoor out of the Newbie computer system. They find the door and open it, finding the soul of a Newbie, and kidnap it back into the simulation as the Newbies pull the plug. The hyperactive evolution overclocks within the system and they will the Newbie to evolve out of the physical dimension. They have no idea if they banished one or somehow all of the enemy species, it turns out they did and that is why the enemy ship never arrives. The pair realizes that, barring a miracle, they're trapped inside the simulation forever. Fly and Arlene resolve that they can will their new reality to be better than the original by ending the invasion before it lands. Arlene hopes she can un-remember Albert's death so she can be with him again. The end?
I awoke to a brave new world that had such damned peculiar creatures in it! - The nineteen-book Cold War-era After the End series Doomsday Warrior (not to be confused with the game), by Reidar Syvertsen and Jan Stacy (under the shared pseudonym of Ryder Stacy), suffers from severe Kudzu Plot and many a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment to begin with, and gets Denser and Wackier from the tenth book on out in the bargain. Nonetheless: the story ends with the hero and his most trusted crew on their way off of an asteroid after finally killing the Big Bad—having stopped the Death Ray, but with it still up in the air whether they've thwarted the Colony Drop which they were there to avert to begin with—only to skip to an epilogue set a thousand years later, in which an inexplicably still-surviving (if possibly no longer quite human) member of the hero's crew and a character who was introduced (and possibly killed off) in that very book have an incomprehensible philosophical argument in a seaside Arcadia.
- The Fall (1956) ends with the narrator breaking the fourth wall and implying that the reader was, like himself, an accomplice to the suicide described earlier in the story.
- In Fame, Elisabeth finds herself in one of Leo's stories together with him, talking to his characters. When she asks him why, he simply vanishes from the story and leaves her in a world where no one knows who he his, and where as the author, he has full power over what she says and does. The straightforward explanation would be that she left him and he just included her in a later story out of spite, but more surrealistic interpretations are also possible.
- British children's/teens' author Alan Garner has an affinity for the Gainax Ending that is unusual in non-adult fiction. The Owl Service ends with a young girl who had been possessed by an incredible supernatural force converting that force from anger — "owls" to peace — "flowers". However, everything else about the characters' relationships (which have been totally wrecked) is left unresolved.
- The Giver ends with Jonas getting a vision of a family celebrating Christmas. The ending is written ambiguously enough that the reader can interpret it as Jonas and Gabe escape, or they end up back at the Community, or the ending is a Dying Dream, or what-have-you. Lois Lowry responded with a Shrug of God when asked about it, although Messenger heavily implies their survival and Son confirms it. Still doesn't explain the Christmas thing, though...
- The Goosebumps series subscribed to the theory that a book wasn't complete without a Mandatory Twist Ending, leading to a few endings that came out of nowhere and made no sense even in a setting where anything can be mistaken for anything else so long as it takes place over a chapter break. There was one where the main characters turned out to be dogs transformed into humans. There was one where it turned out that a seemingly supernatural incident was being faked by some characters who were secretly aliens all along. There was even one where the story you'd been reading was a work-in-progress written by the monster for his monster friends.
- Thomas Pynchon is well-known for this, with endings that frequently leave the central mysteries of the plot unresolved or just bury the narrative under tons of symbolism. The most famous example is probably Gravity's Rainbow, which ends with Rocket 00000 apparently destroying the text itself. Suitably, the narrative itself begins to disintegrate at the end. The ending of The Crying of Lot 49 may also be fairly well known, as it does not resolve whether the conspiracies Oedipa has been researching are real, whether they're an elaborate hoax planned out by her ex-boyfriend, whether they're being hallucinated by her, or something else entirely. All are acknowledged by Oedipa herself as possibilities.
- Joe Haldeman:
- Haldeman has written several novels (Mindbridge, Forever Peace, Worlds trilogy) where the plot seems to have come to a halt, and the resolution apparently is to introduce an all-powerful, invisible, sadistic alien that randomly murders and tortures several of the characters. Then this alien wanders off, apparently satisfied it's made its point, whatever that was. Then the plot continues to some anti-climactic 'and life goes on' type of ending.
- Haldeman's short story "Monster" is presented as a document being dictated by a Vietnam vet confined to a mental hospital. In it, the vet insists that, when he was a member of a LRRP patrol in 'Nam, he watched a black-skinned, black-furred creature come out of nowhere and tear apart two other platoon members engaged in a homosexual encounter. However, a Viet Cong deserter who happened to approach at the same time testified that it was him, our narrator, who committed the crime, and of course our narrator can't say he saw a monster for fear it will make him sound even more crazy. Our narrator spends years in an asylum, after being adjudged insane. While inside, he studies legend upon legend about monsters, but can't find anything in the literature that resembles what he knows he saw. When he comes out, he hunts down the former Viet Cong soldier, now an American citizen, and tortures him to make him admit the truth — that either the former VC is the monster, or that he saw what our narrator saw and wouldn't admit it. To no avail; the former VC says nothing, and our narrator kills him, turns himself in and is put back into an insane asylum. The story ends with a doctor's report detailing the incident of the night before: Our narrator was found dead in his cell from having his heart torn out. But there was no break-in, no signs of a struggle, and no noise. The story's last line is: "He did it to himself, and in total silence." The questions the story raises remain unanswered — was there really a monster or wasn't there?
- Most of Robert A. Heinlein's endings tend to taper off into absolute nothingness. The Number of the Beast has often been said to be best left about 2/3rds of the way through, and Friday is much the same.
- Hero in the Shadows, by David Gemmell. After a straightforward ending in which the invading demonic hordes are pushed back, the epilogue engages in some pretty strong Mind Screw: Waylander, who has only hours left to live, is sent into an alternate universe, where he manages to prevent the rape and murder of his wife - making it not only an alternate universe, but the past as well, or something like that. He then dies, after which the Waylander from that dimension comes home to his wife. The End. Early in the novel there is a reference to a fortune teller prophesying that Waylander will never know peace until he looks up into his own face. Which is exactly what happens: after saving his wife and child in an alternate past reality and preventing the moment that turns him into a assassin he dies looking up at the alternate version of himself, knowing he is free from the nightmare his life would become.
- David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest provides a bunch of hints near the end that come close to explaining the strangeness of the first chapter, and sets up a dramatic climax, then ends very deliberately before that climax, in the middle of a secondary character's flashback.
- Stephen King:
- From a Buick 8 and especially 'The Colorado Kid' are based on this theme: the mysterious death of the eponymous character from 'Kid' is no closer to resolution at the end than the beginning.
- The Dark Tower series could be considered as this trope as well. Although the ending does tie into the overall theme of 'ka' (Karma/fate) as being a wheel, so it could be more of a symbolic ending. What happens is that, after his very long quest to reach the Tower, Roland climbs to its top... and suddenly finds himself back at the beginning of the first book.
- The Long Walk. The ending is a bit confusing. Why does Stebbins suddenly drop dead? Who is the shadowy figure beckoning to Garraty? Fan theories abound.
- Legacy of the Force is particularly bittersweet, but it raises two questions: Is Jacen redeemed or not, and how the hell did Daala become president? But between the fanservice, the Cain and Abel, the paedophilia, and the like, Gainax could've written it.
- The ending of The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton really throws readers for a loop, even taking its subtitle, "A Nightmare" into account. The confusion is even addressed in the book's dedication to his friend E. Clerihew Bently, in the form of a poem:GKC: Oh, who shall understand but you; yea, who shall understand?
- The series Maximum Ride by James Patterson. Ends with much cataclysm, as promised (leading to a Downer Ending), but no one knows what caused it.
- Robert Sheckley's Mindswap has this. The hero ends up trapped in the "Twisted World" but believes himself to have regained his own body and returned home successfully.
- Not only does Mostly Harmless see every possible version of Earth and therefore every version of Arthur and Trillian destroyed forever by the Vogons, concluding their plot arc, but it completely fails to tie up any number of outstanding plotlines. It does include a possible Ultimate Question in "Where does it all end?" (42.)
- The Polish novel series Mr Hopkins for young readers—about a time-travelling gentleman—has the occasional weird mystery that never quite gets explained. The endings of the second and third books, in particular, get quite trippy:
- The second installment has a bizarre ending where Mr Hopkins decides to time-travel to London to visit his grandfather Sherlock Holmes, but instead inexplicably ends up in a featureless void where he meets a man implied to be Albert Einstein, then he finds himself back at his home only to realize that he's actually his own young sidekick, Karol. Then Karol looks into a mirror and sees Mr Hopkins inside, who promises that he will return soon and vanishes. The book ends at this point. In the third book, it's explained that that entire ending was Karol's fever dream, which is probably the only explanation possible.
- At the end of the third and final installment, some time after meeting the Time Police who forbid him from time-travelling ever again, Mr Hopkins somehow meets the three mythical Moirai (the series having never involved any mythical or supernatural elements up to that point) who tie his thread of life into a loop. Mr Hopkins then ends up back at the beginning of the series, with no memories, and the narration implies that he's now trapped in a Stable Time Loop forever. The end.
- In Nuklear Age by Brian Clevinger (who made 8-Bit Theater), most of the book is a comedic parody of the superhero genre, somewhat akin to The Tick. The last section of the book turns dark quite rapidly as nearly everyone dies in a villain-caused apocalypse that kills off half the planet's population and destroys every major city but three, and injects a bunch of philosophy based somewhat off of Norse Mythology into the mix. It was quite the elaborate joke, at least according to The Apology.
- The Polish book Osobliwe przypadki Cymeona Maksymalnego is a few hundred pages of teen drama. Then, at the very end, the protagonist is approached out of the blue by some creepy guy who invites him to follow him into a dark forest. The protagonist follows him obediently, even though he's got no reason to do so, and in fact suspects that the man is a Serial Killer. Then the novel just ends, almost mid-sentence.
- The Pendragon Adventure: A mild example, but the contradictions within it make it fall under this trope. Though told every person displaced through time and space must stay on the ruined worlds they're currently on and can't go back home, and after most of the Travelers return to Solara, Bobby expresses regret that he won't be able to live a normal life. Uncle Press considers this. Suddenly, a flashback of Bobby's "normal" life plays, where he never became a Traveler, married Courtney, and Mark died of cancer. Bobby is lying on his deathbed when a strange man in a long coat comes in and gives him a clutter of papers- his old journals. End book. Many fans believe Bobby was being given his happy ending through Lifelight, but DJ MacHale never confirmed or denied this.
- Greg Egan's novel Permutation City ends with the simulated universe called "the Autoverse" somehow becoming more real than the hardware it was running on, much to the confusion of all the characters involved, as well as the reader.
- Fredrick Pohl seems to like this. In the penultimate chapter of Jem the POV protagonist gets knocked out at the start of a war involving everyone on the eponymous planet. The next chapter is set in a radically different society several generations into the future with no real mention of how we went from one to the other, and nothing by tantalizing glimpse of how this new civilization came about, or how it works. In Gateway, the protagonist is undergoing psychiatric care to resolve the issues in his life. At the conclusion, we discover the reason he's come to the (robot) psychiatrist in the first place, and the story ends without a real attempt at closure.
- Remnants suffered from a Kudzu Plot, and the finale made little attempt to resolve things logically. In our second-to-last book, Tate winds up Sharing a Body with the Troika, who are good now, and somehow time-travels to the past (but still after the Rock hit?) to crash Mother into the Earth. Back with our main characters, Sancho has a vision from... Tate's spirit, maybe?, to go to the crash site. It turns out that Billy (who is Sharing a Body with the missing five humans from the Mayflower?) can use Tate's corpse to fix the Earth, somehow, as long as he's holding Echo's blind baby. This has to happen on Echo's birthday, because reasons. Also 2Face hears her dead mother talking to her and then dies. Eventually Billy does the thing and also dies, and somehow the world now has grass and cows again; this also gives the baby sight. We end with a Distant Finale where the characters are married with kids, and everybody's superpowers just sort of faded away over time, with no explanation of where they came from in the first place. The Alphas are noted to have mysteriously vanished, as did D-Caf without anybody noticing.
- The Science of Discworld Volume 1 ends this way. Long story short, the wizards have accidentally created a pocket universe where magic does not exist, where worlds are round balls rather than discs on the back of turtles and elephants. At the end, the computer Hex mentions "Recursion Is Occurring" and then, after the wizards have abandoned the "Roundworld Project", we see a discworld atop elephants and a turtle condensing out of gas and dust in the far reaches of its universe...
- A Series of Unfortunate Events. Basically every single plot point in the series was left unresolved at the end. The last book can best be summarized as "Ha, ha! In life, there are lots of mysteries you'll never know the answer to."
- In The Beatrice Letters, it explains very briefly what was happened to the Baudelaires after the 13th book. Not a whole lot, just enough to keep the mystery alive.
- Moreover, the reader not only finds out the fate of almost all the major characters (even if that fate is occasionally metaphorical), but enough information is given for the readers to make a good guess about the immediate Lemony/Beatrice backstory, even if the characters can't. The author doesn't give explicit answers, but a lot is done by implication.
- On the other hand, it doesn't even give a hint about the Sugarbowl Secret.
- The very final sentence does reveal who Beatrice was, although most readers will probably have figured it out already.
- And to be perfectly honest, the series was warning the readers that they wouldn't like the ending all along. Readers, however, were hoping Snicket was kidding.
- Subverted with the the Netflix TV series which, while it doesn't answer every question, does end with some definitive happy endings to certain supporting characters, an actual answer to the Sugarbowl Secret, and an implied, but happy And the Adventure Continues for the Baudelaire siblings. Clearly even Snicket must've not been happy with how his own books ended after a while, as he's directly involved with the show and even wrote the scripts for several of the episodes.
- Neal Stephenson books:
- Cryptonomicon: although the novel's ending is implied to be suitably epic, by that point in the story, the POV character has lost interest, so all we get is a bare-bones version of events, with a month's worth of events crammed into just under six pages.
- Anathem actually has a proper ending, so he may be growing out of this.
- The Sweet Valley Twins "Frightening Four" miniseries. It's also a blatant ripoff of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) (see the Film folder, above).
- Toward the end of Through the Looking-Glass (Lewis Carroll's sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland), Alice has just been crowned a queen and is being honored with a royal banquet, when suddenly the candles on the table grow up to the ceiling, the bottles attach plates to themselves as wings and start to fly, the guests lie down in the dishes while the food and utensils start to walk around, the White Queen disappears into the soup tureen and the Red Queen shrinks down to the size of a kitten. Even considering the Cloudcuckooland setting, it's an exceptionally weird ending for Alice's dream, making the more famous trial scene that ended her dream in the first book look positively sane by comparison. Then after waking up, Alice starts speculating that she herself could be a mere figment in the dreams of the sleeping Red King, who she saw earlier in the book.
- Warm Bodies makes clear that its zombies aren't simply diseased humans, and implies early on that they're in some way supernatural, but most of the story plays out in a pseudo-realistic fashion. Then the ending all but states that zombies are a consequence of human sin, and explicitly calls upon The Power of Love to fight them. This doesn't outright contradict anything earlier in the story, but it leaves a lot of unanswered questions.
- A.E. van Vogt's fixup novel The Weapon Shops of Isher, which is mostly about the eponymous weapon shops, the Isher Empire that opposes them, and an immortal man trying to keep them in balance, ends with an alien concluding that humanity is "the race that shall rule the sevagram". This is the first time anyone in the story has mentioned a sevagram, and we never learn what it actually is.
- In-Universe in Walter Moers's Zamonia series. Hildegunst von Mythenmetz has once written a novel of nine hundred pages, where he intricately develops the many plot lines and characters, only to end the book completely out of the blue with his own recipe for sunny side eggs.
- Yeats is Dead has such an ending. The murder mystery conspiracy novel ends with all the characters politely having brunch while working out a solution they can all agree to. These members include people who were trying to actively murder each other just hours beforehand.
