Why Stephen King's Endings Have A Reputation For Disappointment

(This post contains spoilers for several Stephen King books. If you see the title of a book mentioned, expect to see a spoiler soon after.)

Every Stephen King fan remembers their first experience with a bad King ending. For many it's "The Stand," where after over a thousand pages of build-up the day is saved by God himself swooping down and blowing up the bad guys. For other readers, it's "It," which features a sex scene so controversial that most non-book readers think you're joking when you tell them about it. 

My first disappointment with King came at the end of "The Long Walk," a riveting 300-page thriller King wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. I read the entire book in one sitting almost without even realizing it; it was disturbing, immersive, and fast-paced, and by the final chapter I was prepared to give it a five-star rating on Goodreads. But then it ended on a flat, confusing note; the main character won the deadly walking competition, but the prose suddenly derailed into incoherent insanity. On first read, it felt too abrupt, too unsatisfying, to truly work for me. My prevailing reaction was to wonder, "...That's it?" 

"Stephen King sucks at endings" is a common reader complaint, but King himself isn't too worked up about it. In fact, in the 2019 movie "It: Chapter 2," he referenced this complaint in a fun meta-joke, grouchily telling an author character that he hated the ending of his new book. King is a pantser, not a planner, so he largely writes his books by instinct rather than trying to plot it all out beforehand. "I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren't compatible," he said in his memoir, "On Writing." He added, "Why worry about the ending anyway? Why be such a control freak?" 

A lot of King fans could think of some good counter-arguments to this line of reasoning. They could point to the endings of "Under the Dome" or "Cell" and say, "This, Stephen, is why you should worry about the ending!" But are most of King's endings really that bad? Let's give them a closer look.

King's best ending, at least among the thirty or so books I've read from him, is "Misery." This is a page-turner about a writer, Paul Sheldon, who's trapped in a house with his number one fan, Annie Wilkes. The growing tension between Paul and Annie is resolved satisfyingly, taking advantage of multiple Chekhov's guns established early on; more crucial, however, is the way the denouement follows through on Paul's existential crisis as a writer. (Paul's crisis mirrored King's own experience in a lot of ways.) Paul realizes that Annie was right in her complaints about his embarrassment of being a romance novelist and that he was wrong to have some contempt for the women who loved his "Misery" books so much. Paul doesn't just start to heal from his months of intense trauma; he also surprisingly grows as a person.

Of course, most of King's best endings tend to finish on a darker note. "The Shining," "Carrie," and "Pet Sematary," for instance, are great because of how they barrel full-speed towards disaster and they don't ease up when they get there. King's darkest endings tend to be in his shorter books — and by short I mean under 1,000 pages — seemingly because readers are more willing to accept a bleak ending for a character they haven't spent too much time with. With bigger books like "It" and "The Stand," it seemed like King felt he owed the reader a happier ending, as a reward for getting so invested in most of these characters over so many pages; the problem was that he couldn't quite make the happy endings feel earned.

Going off the general rule that the shorter the story the better King's ending is, it's worth noting King's many, many short story/novella collections over his career. "Night Shift," "Just After Sunset," and (my personal favorite) "Different Seasons," are all filled with some of King's best endings. One that still sticks with me, over a decade after reading it, is "The Jaunt" in his 1985 collection "Skeleton Crew," which ends in a gut-punch that's been built up beautifully over the preceding 30 pages. If you want a guaranteed great King ending, pick up a short story collection of his and read one at random.

With some King books, fans can't agree if they stick the landing or not. For a lot of readers, "11/22/63" ends perfectly, centering its final act not around Jake's time-travel shenanigans but around his tragic love affair with Sadie, who he falls in love with in the '60s and is forced to reconnect with as a stranger in the 2010s. Many fans love this ending and consider "11/22/63" to be one of King's best late-career works. 

Other fans hate it, however, because "11/22/63" sort of bails on its main hook. The novel is (seemingly) based on the question, "What if you could go back in time and stop JFK from being assassinated?" There's a decent argument to be made that JFK's death was a net good for society, one that helped the Civil Rights Act pass the following year; but you could also argue that a surviving JFK could've helped avert the big national rightward shift in 1968. 

What was King's stance on this debate? Turns out, he had none. Jake successfully saved JFK's life in '63, but this event caused damage to the space-time continuum, resulting in extreme earthquakes and other natural disasters that didn't happen in our timeline. The result is that when Jake returns to the present, the world is an apocalyptic nightmare, not because of anything JFK did but because the planet itself is magically falling apart. For any reader hoping to read the author's earnest attempt to answer one of the most compelling "what if?" questions in all of American history, this development feels like a total copout. The whole book is basically a giant bait-and-switch, giving you a surprise tragic love story instead of an alternative history story, and that storytelling choice doesn't work for everyone. 

Another divisive finale of King's is the ending to the 7-part "Dark Tower" series. There are certain elements from this book that annoy/disappoint most readers — mainly, the anti-climactic deaths of multiple villains who'd been built up as ominous threats for thousands of pages — but there's one major plot point at the very end that's truly a "love it or hate it" sort of moment: the main character Roland finally reaches the titular Dark Tower, only for it to send him back in time to the start of the first book, with his memory of books 1-7 wiped. Roland's consciousness is trapped in an eternal loop searching for the Dark Tower; there's still some hope that his wearisome quest will end someday, but probably not for at least a couple of loops more. 

I distinctly remember reading that reveal and immediately thinking, "Oh, I don't like this." But the more time goes by the more I appreciate the ending for just how twisted it is. Yes, it hurts my heart, but what else are Stephen King books for?

A big factor in why King's endings are so divisive is that they're often far sadder than the conventional Hollywood approach. King takes trauma seriously, which means that even if a main character survives their novel, it will at best take them a while before they can work through the PTSD. Even "Misery," which ends with Paul's new book being a success and him finding himself again as a writer, still makes it clear that Paul will be haunted by what happened to him for the rest of his life. 

The result is a lot of endings that aren't satisfying at first, but which the reader does learn to begrudgingly respect as time goes by. "The Long Walk," for instance, has an ending I came around to because on further thought it's both realistic and thematically fitting that the main character's victory would turn out to be pyrrhic. Of course, he would lose his mind after so many hours of non-stop stress and exhaustion. The reader was warned early on just how ugly the final stage of the Long Walk looks; why would the protagonist's journey end any differently?

One of my favorite King endings comes from another of his Bachman books: "The Running Man." After spending the whole book being chased across America as part of a messed-up televised game show, the main character gets his revenge by crashing a plane into a skyscraper where the show's producer works. It's dark and angry, and it's the sort of ending King probably wouldn't have written in a post-9/11 environment, but it's also one that feels like something the whole book was heading toward. Provocative as that final scene is, I can't imagine the book ending in any other way. 

Some Stephen King endings may fall flat, and others might be too dark or messy to fully enjoy on the first read, but I'd say the "King sucks at ending" reputation is a bit overblown. In the case of "The Running Man," a cynical page-turner in desperate need of a good movie adaptation, King nailed it.