What are the most compelling endings you have read? (without spoilers)

Kurt Vonnegut had a few great surprise endings. I'll give special mention to two novels:

Galapagos
Cat's Cradle
 
paranoid marvin said:
Green Eggs and Ham has a surprising twist at the end.
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Further to this, i think many of the old Fairy Takes from The Brothers Grimm have shocking endings, many of which were quite macabre and have become forgotten in modern retellings.
 
Not genre but To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
When I first read it, it felt like it ended at exactly the right spot. Not another word was needed.
 
The ending of The Lady In The Lake by Raymond Chandler always sticks with me, when the murderer's body is pulled out of a wrecked car. The murderer, while never likeable, is clearly not wholly bad and has been used by a worse villain. Chandler describes his body as "something that had been a man".
 
hitmouse said:
I remember being massively disappointed by this novel after the brilliant Name of the Rose.
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I preferred it to NOTR, but at the time I first read it (aged 22) I was captivated by all the occult lore, and the central conceit about the Plan that "becomes" real (and seems convincing enough to almost be a real-world possibility) struck me as monumentally clever.

I now quickly lose patience trying to re-read either, though I suspect NOTR is objectively the better book.

For me, Name of the Rose itself ended impactfully -- there was no internet to translate the Latin and I knew nobody who spoke it, and thus it felt heavy with secret meaning.
 
I read Name of the Rose when I was about 20, very quickly. I found the discussions about tiny issues of medieval theology weirdly fascinating.

Just glancing at the bookshelf I remember that Hugh Laurie's novel The Gun Seller has a very good ending, which isn't quite a twist but puts the rest of the story in a new light.
 
hitmouse said:
I remember being massively disappointed by this novel after the brilliant Name of the Rose.
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I couldn't get enough Foucault's Pendulum -- I have found that people seem to either absolutely love the book or stop reading. You seem to be the exception (not liking the book, yet finishing it anyway). After reading Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum I couldn't get enough Umberto Eco. Sad to see him pass. Since I am also a Vonnegut fan I was thrilled when Eco made a Siren's of Titan reference in his final novel.

Eco's nonfiction is pretty amazing also. Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition transformed my perspective of society and the world.
 
Cthulhu.Science said:
I couldn't get enough Foucault's Pendulum -- I have found that people seem to either absolutely love the book or stop reading. You seem to be the exception (not liking the book, yet finishing it anyway). After reading Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum I couldn't get enough Umberto Eco. Sad to see him pass. Since I am also a Vonnegut fan I was thrilled when Eco made a Siren's of Titan reference in his final novel.

Eco's nonfiction is pretty amazing also. Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition transformed my perspective of society and the world.
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I had to finish it as I had bought the paperback new, which was a chunk out of my undergraduate stipend. I was living on instant noodles at that point in my life.
 
The last chapter of The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett reflects on what came before and transforms the novel from excellent mystery/adventure story, into something more poignant. I think I could support saying something similar about LOTR.

There's an inevitability to the ending of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson that touches and saddens me.

The ending to The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles Finney annoyed me for about three readings, but subsequent readings have made me think it was the only logical ending given what came before.

The ending of The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll is particularly memorable and chilling. His Voice of Our Shadow also ends with a chill.

And speaking of chills, Ross Macdonald orchestrates the plot of The Chill to arrive at the solution in the final line, which makes it memorable; Toni Morrison's Jazz does something similar and does it even better.
 
The Passage trilogy by Justin Cronin. The bittersweetness of the end was incredible touching, to the point it made me re-read the entire trilogy right after finishing (something very uncommon for me)
 
Johnny God His Gun by Dalton Trumbo Considering the predicament of the main character Joe Bonham, the ending horrifying and its not surpass in thatches is on a list of best horror novels .
 
I recently read Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and the last chapter made a significant impact on me.
 
I found the ending of Blindsight by Peter Watts to be deeply haunting. One of the only bits of horror I've ever read that didn't leave me at least slightly disappointed by the resolution.
 
Ori Vandewalle said:
I found the ending of Blindsight by Peter Watts to be deeply haunting. One of the only bits of horror I've ever read that didn't leave me at least slightly disappointed by the resolution.
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Did you read the sequel? Wow.
 
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