Ending Fatigue / Literature

• Some readers of Dick Francis's 10 Lb. Penalty dislike the Time Skip the last fifty pages or so cover, and George Juilliard's further political career, and feel that his initial election to MP would have been a good stopping point if the villains' comeuppance had been moved forward to that point.
• Jurassic Park (1990): Tim has successfully improvised himself through Jurassic Park's computers to finally restore the main power, thus securing the survivors and being able to call for help. The end, right? Nope, Grant insists that they have to find all the dinosaur nests and count the eggs. They only find one nest before the Costa Rican military arrives, muscles the survivors off the island, and then firebombs it. Then when they get home, there's a Sequel Hook hinting at dinos that have escaped to the mainland... which was never followed upon in the sequel.
• Stephen King is prone to this trope. It's said that he's great at fitting a 300-page story into a 600-page book.
  • The Stand features an endless epilogue about how someone gets back home after the climax. The uncut version has an additional epilogue, though this one's only a few pages.
  • It: During the final (1985) confrontation, a storm rages aboveground while the Losers' Club battles Pennywise (in Its Giant Spider form) in Its lair; the effects of the incredibly destructive storm on the residents (and landmarks) of Derry are exhaustively described. After the Losers finally defeat It, the book goes on to describe how the surviving members of the Club leave Derry one by one, how each one of them (including Mike) are forgetting everything for good this time, and how Bill revives the catatonic Audra. And then, how the Losers parted ways after their confrontation with It in 1958.
  • Firestarter. After the slam-bang climax at the Shop's HQ, there's a sizable dénouement with Charlie finding her way back to the Manders' farm, Irv and Norma nursing her back to health while trying to keep quiet her presence at the farm (the reconstituted Shop is determined to find her and liquidate her), and, finally, her journey to NYC to find someone to tell her story to.
• Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the best American novel right up until Tom Sawyer shows up. Ernest Hemingway famously said, "If you read it you must stop where... Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating."
• The last several books of the Left Behind series suffered from this problem. After the Antichrist came back from the dead, killed people with fiery pillars from the sky, and desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem, there just wasn't anything more evil for him to do. And that was Book Eight of a 13 book series (not counting the three prequels). It doesn't help that anyone who will read that particular series through Book Eight already knows the ending (spoiler: Satan loses) and is just slogging along to see exactly how they're going to get there.
• While their quality remains consistent throughout, Harry Turtledove's Darkness Series are of an incredible length. The series probably does go one book too many, but it's based on World War II, which did extend three years past the "climax" (Stalingrad, El Alamein, and Midway) to resolve.
  • His various series may fall here, though. One particular novel may look as if it's coming to the conclusion of a particular world's story, with a trilogy just about to be wrapped up... but nope, it's still going, and a new trilogy is about to start, so you still have to keep reading...
• Christopher Paolini's Inheritance has about 150 pages after the big bad is defeated.
• Dean Koontz's Phantoms. While a very good book overall, the battle against the Ancient Enemy is clearly the climax. Following that, the fight at the hospital feels completely tacked on. It is only tangentially related to the main plot and doesn't count as a Twist Ending or Ass Pull because it doesn't actually change anything. It just feels like an attempt to cram one last dramatic moment into the final chapter, and it falls flat because the main plot of the story has already been soundly resolved.
• Diana Wynne Jones's later children's books. Readers used to complain that she finished her plots too abruptly and without sufficient explanation (the original book of Howl's Moving Castle and Fire and Hemlock are cases in point). Clearly her editor has got on to her about this, because from The Merlin Conspiracy onward, every single book seems to have a satisfying conclusion, and then at least one or two chapters explaining what happened to all the characters after that. Conrad's Fate tells you what happens in the next ten years or so.
• Pamela. You'd think it would end after she resists and reforms her boss and they get married, plunking down An Aesop in the process. No, there are still 200 pages. It reaches the happily-ever-after and, instead of rolling credits, just keeps on going.
• Some people have this view of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The real climax point is when Harry learns that it was Peter Pettigrew and not Sirius Black that betrayed his parents...in Chapter 19 of 22, after which there's another 40 pages where Harry and Hermione go back in time and relive the climax again to put things in place for Sirius to escape.
• Used apparently on purpose and lampshaded in Sir Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals, which has "You think it's all over?" written in large letters, followed by another scene, a few times.
  • As well as being a lampshading of this trope, this is a reference to the famous commentary of England's victory over Germany in the World Cup of 1966, which went into extra time after finishing level after 90 minutes, but which eventually led to England's victory. Which possibly makes the game itself an example of this trope.
  • Also to an extent, but unlampshaded, in Hogfather. Susan's saved the Hogfather and defeated the Auditors. Then she still has to deal with Teatime. Fair enough, it's just that Your Princess Is in Another Castle!. But then, with the main story definitely concluded, Pterry remembers the subplots and resolves them all one after the other: the raven's quest for carrion; the Cheerful Fairy and other manifestations of belief; Albert and the rocking horse; Ridcully's bathroom; and finally, the Canting Crew and their unexpected Hogswatch dinner, previously referred to about halfway through the book.
  • Just about all of Terry Pratchett's books have this, though he writes it well enough and the books are short enough that the extended endings are not unpleasant to read.
• This Body. It's about a middle-aged mom named Katherine who dies unexpectedly and finds herself a year in the future in the body of a 20-something named Thisby (yes, A Midsummer Night's Dream is a recurring theme), who died of a drug overdose. Most of the book is about Katherine getting Thisby's life together and finding ways to reconnect with her original family. The book is interesting, but it soon becomes clear that the author didn't know how to finish it, and there's some three-month flash-forward before the book wanders into its ending.
• Battlefield Earth. The climactic battle against the aliens actually occurs at about 300 pages into the 1,050 page paperweight of a book. Once the humans have kicked the evil aliens off Earth, the rest of the book deals with the surviving villains fighting over the scraps of their empire, and some kind of legal battle over the real estate ownership status of the planet.
• The Lord of the Rings: The climax of the story takes place little over the halfway point of Return Of The King, with the return journeys home being just as important as the journey to Mordor in the first place, practically making it read like a Post-Script Season. Partly justified: Tolkien didn't want a cliche "happy-ever-after" ending, and included the Scouring of the Shire to show how the small hobbits of the Fellowship had grown into true heroes in and of themselves. It also shows how most of the hobbit race (except for some bad eggs) are Crouching Moron Hidden Badasses when push truly comes to shove, and that they absolutely abhor killing their own kind, which was one of the MAJOR failings of the Elves of the First Age.
• In The Poisonwood Bible, the epilogue is actually a sizable portion of the book. It details the lives of all of the main characters over the next thirty years. The book really ends almost 37 years later.
• Anna Karenina: The eponymous character commits suicide and the plot essentially ends at the end of book seven. There's a whole other hundred-page book dealing with the spiritual awakening of secondary character Levin, Tolstoy's Author Avatar. It's referred to even in academic circles as somewhat masturbatory; Tolstoy had gone through a similar spiritual experience and wanted to spread the word.
  • War and Peace gets dinged for this as well; after the war ends and we find out the fates of all the main characters, Tolstoy gives us a long dissertation on history and the forces that decide the fates of nations. Fascinating stuff, if a bit dry.
• The endings of many of Joe Haldeman's novels feel incredibly forced. Oddly enough, however, he uses this trope to good effect in The Forever War, as he's set the story up such that the only way to end it is to force an ending, which reinforces the point that the war has been going on for so many centuries that, at least on the part of the humans, no one knows any longer why they're fighting or what they hope to accomplish.
• Atlas Shrugged, more specifically John Galt's speech. Actually, you could skip the entire novel and just read that speech, and you'd get the gist of Ayn Rand's point anyway.
• The Fountainhead as well. Around page 350, when Howard Roark gets his grand-standing speech in court describing his motives and his view on humanity (pretty much dropping Rand's anvil, if you haven't been awake long enough to get what she was aiming at the whole book). It seems when you've got your character in a position to monologue for three pages about everything that he did since the beginning of the book to society at a whole, this is a good place to say, "climax! Now for the denouement!" Roark is acquitted, and the rest of the book just deals with cleaning up loose ends of what happens to him, Dominique, Wynand, and Toohey (but not Keating, whose testimony at the trial pretty much ends his career as an architect).
• The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown: We hit the climax of the book with a good 2 or 3 chapters in hand, which are then spent tying up loose ends and discussing Christianity.
• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair seems to find something of an ending when Jurgis joins the socialist labor union cause... and then the book goes on for another 20 pages to outline some arguments important to the socialist cause at the time. Even if you're familiar with Marxism and know what they're talking about, it's hard to read.
• The Vorkosigan Saga book Memory has three endings. First, the main detective plot wraps up; then, Miles makes a decision about whether to take up Gregor's offer; and then he goes off to sort things out with Quinn. The two later endings are necessary to the continuing story, though, so if they hadn't been wrapped up in this one, they would have needed to be explained in the next book.
• The Deltora Quest series has this problem. First, Lief has to find the seven gems for the Belt of Deltora, the only tool capable of defeating the Shadow Lord. Then collect and assemble the three pieces of the Pirran Pipe, the only tool capable of rescuing the people captured by the Shadow Lord. Then wake up the last seven dragons in Deltora, the only creatures capable of destroying the Four Sisters, evil objects slowly killing Deltora and created by the Shadow Lord. Lastly, said dragons must destroy an explosion of grey poison capable of destroying Deltora, and by doing so, defeating the Shadow Lord.
• The Goldfinch: After the novel's climax, in which its central plot concern is resolved, we are still waiting to find out which of the protagonist's two love interests he's going to end up with, and whether he's going to get any kind of comeuppance for selling counterfeit antiques. Instead, there is a long rambling digression about the allure of self-destructiveness and the value of art. After hundreds of pages of buildup, we never actually do get any romantic resolution and the counterfeits plot is likewise left unresolved.
• Bats Fly at Dusk by Erle Stanley Gardner plays with it. While most of this series are first-person narratives from Donald Lam, this book is a third-person narrative centering around his partner, Bertha Cool while Donald is in the navy during World War II. Donald sends several telegrams suggesting lines of inquiry and pointing out facts about her case, but Bertha finally washes her hands of the case and goes fishing. The next day she comes back to the office to find Donald got a military pass, came to town, solved the case, and left her a note explaining it and pointing out her mistakes.
• Coldheart Canyon: The tiled room's power is broken, and from there the forces that kept the villain safe are destroyed. The villain gets a satisfying comeuppance... and then the two survivors deal with a police investigation and a book based on their experiences, along with getting on with their lives. Then they learn that the male lead's soul hasn't crossed over yet, and try to save him from the inevitable before everyone realizes that there's no need to fight fate. This takes about 100 pages. To make matters worse, had this material been trimmed or dropped, the 75-or-so pages that set up the minor subplot points resolved in it could have been cut too!
• American Gods: After the book's climax is over, we're treated to 50 or so pages dedicated to tying up a minor subplot that's been sidelined since the middle of the book. Once that's done we get a proper epilogue but for some readers, the climax is too far gone for this to really matter.
• Book of the Dead (2006) sees the antagonist's plot foiled and said antagonist currently facing the front end of a gun. So villain gets killed and the story wraps up? Not yet. Instead, we see him survive his attempted murder and have an extra hundred pages devoted to him getting hunted down before the story finally wraps up.
• Feed (2002). The point about how the execution of the New Media had been pretty much made within part 2 - part 3 and 4 of the novels seem to feel like Anderson is trying to hammer it in even more.
• Billy Budd: Readers may be bored by the chapters following Billy's hanging, and Melville himself appears to have had difficulty continuing the story, especially since he was working against his own impending death. Melville's manuscript contains a paragraph briefly concluding the tale three chapters later on a highly cynical note, though this is usually printed as a footnote since the author did find time to write one more chapter after that. The play by Coxe and Chapman ends with the hanging scene, and Britten's opera cuts from it to a Framing Device that ignores Melville's continuation.
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: After the whole book has revolved around Dorothy and her friends seeking to have their wishes granted by the Wizard, and after he gives the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion the brain, heart and courage they wanted (or rather, symbols of them, since they really had those qualities all along), but fails to send Dorothy home, we're anxious to see Dorothy find some other way to get home and wrap up the story. But instead we get several more chapters in which our heroes journey to Glinda's country to ask her for help, having various episodic adventures along the way. It's no wonder that the classic 1939 movie, [[Theatre/The Wiz]], and other adaptations cut all those extra adventures and just have Glinda appear right away to help Dorothy after the Wizard's departure.

---