A Good Ending

The same family circumstances that made my last post a short one are still ongoing. But I wanted to offer something for my monthly contribution and while I was mulling it over, I thought about endings. 

Every book should have an opening that grabs the reader. Otherwise you wouldn’t want to read it. But a good ending – for me at least - wraps everything up with a satisfying CLICK. It lets me put the book down with – well, a happy glow; a sigh of sadness; a shout of triumph, or even just the sombre ripples of a human truth gracefully revealed.

Here, in no particular order, are some of my favourites.With a few covers thrown in as clues.

I never saw any of them again, except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.

 

 It’s not a particularly exciting life, but it’s my life. And I’m bloody well going to try my best to live it.

And the canisters of gas still stand in their concrete chamber, leaning towards the steel-shuttered windows, as if waiting for someone or something to come once more and set them free.

This ends my true account of how I avenged Frank Ross’s blood over in the Choctaw Nation when snow was on the ground.

 

Wooley fell out, and the last that Wallace and Cowie saw of him, before they sheered away in fright, was his long brown flying coat opening in the wind and checking his fall. For a moment it billowed out and let his smoking plane fall away; and then the coat collapsed, and Wooley dropped too.

 

So we beat on, boats against the current, drawn back ceaselessly into the past.

At the end of the field, among the thin gold spikes of grass and the harebells and Gypsy roses and St John’s Wort, we may just take one last look, over our shoulders, at the white house where neither we nor anyone else is wanted now.