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8 Worst Stephen King Book Endings, Ranked
Since Stephen King has written a massive number of books, he’s also, quite naturally, had to write a huge number of endings, and some of those endings aren’t exactly well-loved. Even if you want to look at his best works, you’ll find people who have issues with how those books end up wrapping up, as can be seen with the likes of The Stand, It, and the final book in The Dark Tower series.
In the eyes of this writer, those endings are all good, actually. And then there are also books like 11/22/63 and Pet Sematary that have genuinely great endings, or at least endings where most people are like, “Hey, yeah, that wasn’t bad.” The following novels, on the other hand, do not conclude very well, and all of them have some of the worst endings Stephen King has written to date.
8
‘Cell’ (2006)
The best part of Cell is how it opens, and that’s not too controversial an opinion to have, by any means. This is one of a fair few Stephen King stories where the author expresses his displeasure with cell phones, but while such “old man yelling at cloud” moments are usually relegated to little one-off moments, here, the whole book has that kind of energy. The phones turn people into zombies, basically, or zombie-like creatures.
And when it’s all starting to go down, early on, it’s kind of thrilling, with Cell being one of many Stephen King books that the author manages to get off to a good start. But it becomes increasingly harder to stay invested, even with the novel not exactly being an epic, by any means (there are longer books by King that stay entirely interesting throughout). It’s a novel that gets slowly worse as it trudges along to an eventually merciful ending, but at least the book still manages to be a potentially decent (or not entirely irredeemable) read, unlike the movie adaptation of Cell.
7
‘The Tommyknockers’ (1987)
The Tommyknockers sees Stephen King getting very weird, even by the standards of a King book released in the 1980s, and there are probable reasons for that there isn’t time to get into here. Let’s just stick to the basics, as much as that’s possible, for such a wild and chaotic book. In The Tommyknockers, the people of a small town all become affected by an object discovered in the woods, and said object seems to be of an extra-terrestrial origin.
Stephen King isn’t the best at sci-fi, but he’s helmed some good ones a little more recently than The Tommyknockers, like 11/22/63 and Under the Dome (the ending to the latter isn’t quite as disastrous as some people make it out to be). With The Tommyknockers, though, you get the sense he really wasn’t in control, and while the wildness of it all can be sporadically fun, the whole thing eventually collapses under its own weight, especially near the end. Finding a final page and getting through it feels like a mercy kill; like The Tommyknockers finally being Old Yeller’d. Takes a while to get there, but better late than never, right?
6
‘Holly’ (2023)
If you read everything Stephen King has ever written, you’re going to run into the character of Holly Gibney a fair few times. She was introduced in Mr. Mercedes, then played a supporting role in the following two books centered around Bill Hodges, all before having another supporting role in The Outsider, and then going on to be at the center of one of the novellas featured in If It Bleeds.
Holly is a fairly weak novel, and pretty half-hearted, with an ultimately laughable pair of antagonists who are brought down in a boring and predictable fashion.
All these stories ended up better than Holly, which is, unfortunately, the character’s first protagonist role in a full-blown novel, and the novel itself is a bit of a mess. After If It Bleeds, which explicitly takes place at the end of 2020, Holly is all about COVID and the main character dealing with it, while taking on a case, which wouldn’t feel jarring if If It Bleeds had mentioned it. But it couldn’t, since King wrote it before COVID, and then he decided that Holly’s world would have COVID anyway, just not the sort that anyone worried about in 2020, anyway. Even beyond that, Holly is a fairly weak novel, and pretty half-hearted, with an ultimately laughable pair of antagonists who are brought down in a boring and predictable fashion, by the book’s (eventual and merciful) end.
5
‘Lisey’s Story’ (2006)
Of all the dozens upon dozens of novels King has written, the man himself considers Lisey’s Story as his best, and he’s welcome to feel that way, even if it’s a little strange he does. Okay, okay, Lisey’s Story is an undeniably personal novel, and for better or worse, you do really feel that while reading it, since it’s about mortality, grief, and writing, all centered around a recently widowed woman dealing with the loss of her husband, who was a writer.
She grapples with memories of him while uncovering things he’d written, and then there’s also some stuff involving a different realm or something, and everything kind of merging and getting messy and, look, it’s a really annoying read. The way the characters talk to each other, and the way it just goes on and on… it’s infuriating, and beyond self-indulgent. If someone who wasn’t King tried to get Lisey’s Story published, it would almost certainly not have been accepted without radical edits. That it ends badly isn’t massively disappointing, in all honesty, since it also starts and progresses throughout (all before the ending) badly, too.
4
‘Desperation’ (1996)
There’s a sister novel to Desperation called The Regulators, and that’s probably the worse book overall, but Desperation ends up being a little more disappointing when it comes to its ending. The Regulators (one of King’s Richard Bachman books) is a mess throughout, but Desperation does have a pretty great start that’s heavy on mystery, involving various people who are all abducted and held captive in a small town by a potentially possessed – or perhaps just deranged – police officer.
Once the truth of what’s happening starts to get revealed, things suddenly become less interesting. Without going into too much detail, Desperation is kind of just another rather fantastical/supernatural battle of good vs. evil, in the end, and one that King had done better before, and with more interesting characters, too. If you read the first half of Desperation and make peace with a lack of conclusion, you’ll probably come away more satisfied than if you stick it out and actually finish the dang thing.
3
‘Elevation’ (2018)
One of two novels about rapid weight loss that Stephen King has written, Elevation is a good deal more optimistic than Thinner, which is the other one, and also, Elevation is a bit of a fantasy (or magical realism) novel compared to the horror focus of Thinner. In Thinner, a man is cursed to lose weight, while in Elevation, a man gradually gets lighter and lighter, all to the point where it seems like he might just float off into the atmosphere, at a point.
And… uh… that’s what happens. This is barely a novel, and sometimes gets called a novella, which feels more accurate. Elevation has been spoiled here, but you’re better off knowing about how silly the ending is (and also, the ending happens so soon after the beginning of the story, so it’s all very slight, in any event). But hey, it’s got that Castle Rock setting. That’s always a somewhat fun town to go back to, right?
2
‘Gwendy’s Final Task’ (2022)
Like Elevation, Gwendy’s Final Task makes for a pretty short read, and it’s also one of several books King has co-written, with the other author here being Richard Chizmar. It would be nice to feel sincere appreciation for the Gwendy trilogy and highlight it as being underrated, but nah, it’s kind of messy. The first book is a nice (but slight) coming-of-age/fantasy/horror book, and then the second, which was written solely by Chizmar… okay, that one’s not great.
But King came back for the third book, Gwendy’s Final Task, and his return did very little. This book concludes the whole trilogy in an admirably baffling fashion, so that makes it more memorable than book #2, albeit maybe not for the reasons you want a book to be memorable. The titular character goes to space, and also, she has Alzheimer’s. In the first book, she was a child, and in the second book, she was a young politician. This is skimming over a lot of stuff, but even in context, reading the whole bleeding thing, it doesn’t really make all that much more sense. Wild ending to a wild and messy trilogy, really.
1
‘The Colorado Kid’ (2005)
If you’re willing to go with The Colorado Kid being an anti-mystery book, in effect, then maybe the ending is defensible. Just that one sentence might already be a spoiler, but also, The Colorado Kid is so very short, so there’s not a great deal to spoil. Also, it’s obscure, and you’re probably only going to feel compelled to read it if you’ve already dedicated yourself to reading everything King ever wrote. If you’re okay with sitting out a few books of his (life is finite and all), then The Colorado Kid is one of the skippable ones.
The narrative here largely concerns the discovery of a dead body, and a large number of questions that come about while trying to identify the person whose body it was, and figure out why he might have died. But then also, so much is not known, and The Colorado Kid intentionally ends with whatever the literary equivalent of a shrug is. It’s pretty lackluster, for a crime/mystery novel, even a short one (thankfully, King’s later works within the genre – including Mr. Mercedes, Joyland, and Later – are all better and more satisfying).
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