What’s a book that you loved the beginning to death only to see it go in a direction you hated and ultimately be a disappointment?
This question comes up because I just read The Keep over the weekend which starts out as a terrific horror novel. A garrison of German soldiers during World War 2 are housed in a Romanian keep when something starts killing them off at night. The captain sends for help and ends up with a squad of SS taking over which only makes things worse. About halfway through the book, we find out what’s going on and it just ruins the atmosphere. Throw in some cardboard characters and a crappy love story and I wanted to throw the book across the room in frustration.
Comments
26 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.Well, this isn’t quite the same thing, but I started David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest with high hopes and found it quite *interesting* if not totally engrossing. Somewhere in the last third of the book though (not counting the EXTENSIVE footnotes), I ran across a passage that stopped me dead in my tracks. I put the book down and never picked it up again (this is well over 10 years later). I just couldn’t continue. I’ve never had that happen while reading any other book, so I guess that counts for something. RIP David.
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Oh noes! I just started IJ. Now I feel a sense of…foreboding?
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Actually, the last one I read that went that way was _Huckleberry Finn_, when Twain pulls in Tom Sawyer and that ridiculous plot fixup about 3/4 through the novel. Couldn’t finish it. Up until then, it was quite interesting.
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Oh–the one other thing that will stop me dead in a novel is when the author switches either from third person to first person or first person to third person. Hate this. Totally breaks up the suspension-of-disbelief. I absolutely, totally, viscerally detest this switch. It reeks of lazy writing and planning. And yet novels are published with this crappy construction. I despise this switch-of-grammatical-person with a red-hot disgust suitable for pig-iron smelters and volcanic outflows. Did I mention that I hated this?
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The Brothers Bulger by Howie Carr. Was hoping to read a good book about the Winter Hill Gang and all I got was a snide cynical opinion piece by Carr, who clearly does not like Whitey or his brother. Not very fair and balanced
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Andromeda Strain. What a rip-off.
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Chris, I was reading that book too last year! I agree with you – great start, a little flat towards the middle and just ARGGGH towards the end.
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I think I was in denial when I got to the middle of the book thinking that it was just a slow part and it’s going to get better. It’ll get better.
Such a great start…
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This is along a similar line, but I loved Death Rides a Pale Horse by Isaac Asimov. I like some of the other books in the series, but was very disappointed with the last book of the series.
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Dear Lord-or-Lord-substitute, did you mean “On a Pale Horse” by Piers Anthony? That’s the most stunningly awful confusion of two authors I’ve ever seen.
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I know I seem to bring this up every time there’s a book thread here, but Mark Twain’s Autobiography.
I love him to pieces, but the deliberate choice not to edit anything makes it a difficult read, to say the least. It would almost make a better series of pamphlets.
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AGAIN with the Twain autobiography.
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Stranger in a Strange Land.
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World War Z. I started out adoring it, but by about halfway through the book I started to read the author’s voice as consistent in all of the interviewed characters, and that sort of killed my enthusiasm for it.
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Couldn’t agree more about WWZ. I still recommend it to people as a whole, but I can’t believe the author did not differentiate a bit more. Mr. Brooks did not change a thing from voice to voice. It was all his voice.
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I agree about Brooks’ voice in the written novel. But check out the audiobook. Having some big-name talent (Alan Alda, Mark Hamill, John Turturro, and others) perform the various “oral histories” puts *ahem* more flesh on the bones and makes for a better experience.
And Brad Pitt had nothing to do with the audiobook, thankfully.
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I was going to say World War Z, but you beat me to it. Early in the book I felt like I was seeing how each country would deal with an epidemic, but I lost interest as the events just turned random and uninteresting.
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“The PIllars of the Earth.” Starts out with a great concept and then is beaten into the ground with relentlessly mediocre writing (and the most 2-dimensional characters anywhere) to the point where it was a chore just to finish it.
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Hate to mention it again, but both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. I only made it through two chapters or so each.
I didn’t finish The God of Small Things because the writing was so amazing, so evocative, so affecting I had nightmares about the characters, and awoke sobbing for them. It was just to affecting for me to finish. Beautiful, amazing writing. I have never been so affected by a book before or since.
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Really a series more than an individual book but about ten years ago I got into the “Wheel of Time” series by Robert Jordan.
It was great at first but I grew to loath it around book six.
That’s about the time I finally realized that I’d been reading the same book for at least four volumes.
I’m kind of glad he’s dead now. I think his wife finally put the saga to bed and now it’s done, and over.
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“Le Chat dans le Chapeau”. Good character development, but half-way through you get the feeling that the anarchy is simply gratuitous. Couldn’t finish it.
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Vive le sarcasme.
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Heinlein’s ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ – It started off pretty good but I really didnt like where it was going and the ending. I know it was written for a completely different era that survived on sci-fi mixing with pulp so I can give it that. I just really didnt like the direction it went in.
Also The Cement Garden was effing twisted as hell!!! I had a hard time finishing it because it just got so shocking as it went on.
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Blood’s a Rover by James Ellroy.
It’s not just a dissapointing second half but a dissapointing end to a three book series.
The Cold Six Thousand might be my favourite novel and unless you don’t like the written style (short sentences light on adhjectives) it’s a faster moving and more exciting story of the most savagely excing characters than any film I’ve ever seen. The actions of the totally amoral cast of characters is relentless.
Blood’s a Rover starts well enough but descends into some 19 year old’s clumsy and sentimental tribute to a girlfriend that has split up with him.
I would pay the full, new, purchase price of that book again if he rewrote the second half and pretend that it never happened.
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The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. It went off the rails very close to the end.
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Reamde by Neal Stephenson Starts of really great and intelligent and ends up a silly chase scene
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