Uncertain ending?

Have you ever read The Mist by Stephen King? Warning ... spoilers!

An unworldly mist descends on Maine. There are monsters in the mist. Our hero is trapped with his son in a supermarket as the mist rolls in. Cue survival in a supermarket with monsters attacking the big glass window. Eventually they escape in a car and drive away.

They drive through the mist to a road near to the hero's house. His wife is still in the house. But the house is by the lake and has big glass windows. She'll be dead for sure.

Our hero thinks about it for a while. Should he drive to the house? Eventually he decides ... nah, not worth it ... and carries on driving.

And that's it. We don't find out what happens to him, to the mist or the quickly forgotten wife. Driving off into the mist, I can just about accept. But abandoning his wife? That ending has pissed me off for more than 30 years.

One thing I love about a good movie is the conversation you have for the next hour after seeing it. Having a few loose ends in my mind allows the reader to come to their own conclusions, at which point they truly evaluate the characters to try and decide how things might play out. What ends you leave loose depends entirely on how you set up your plot. I dunno, my story ends in the middle of a word.

I don't mind uncertainty, but not without suggestion or implication. For example, if the MC is lying shot on the ground, eyes glazing over, thoughts going through his mind, the last of which is wishing he stayed on his phone just a few minutes longer instead of getting annoyed and hanging up (if so he might have not been killed), then there's the suggestion of dying without actually saying it. If there's an epilogue in which the mother attends the funeral of the MC, then therein lies the implication that the character's wound ultimately kills him (or maybe it didn't). Both endings are acceptable to me. If the MC just gets shot... and nothing happens after that, then that would irk me.

The novel should have a proper ending, just as every sentence needs proper punctuation


*See what I did... Doesn't the absence of a period irk you just a little? Same way I feel about uncertain endings.*

Hey,

I wouldn't be glad to be left in the dark, especially when I've come to like the character. I had the same problem with my first novel I'm currently writing (Science Fantasy) and expanded the ending to allow for a better conclusion with a strong possibility for a sequel

Maze Runner said:

I'm sure you have other things to concern yourselves with, like writing your own novels.

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Picking yours apart is so much easier. Bwahahaha.

Maze Runner said:

Hey, thanks for responding. Would it make you feel differently if the female MC, the one who is injured, turns out to be, now that you have all the facts, someone that you don't like?

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Your later posts, like this one, change everything.

This is a real ending. The MC is through with her, period. Nice. He doesn't care if she lives or dies and neither do I.