Stephen King is a great horror writer. In fact, some would argue that, when it comes to horror fiction, he is the greatest of them all.
But his books have also earned a reputation for bad endings. Endings that can feel unsatisfying, anticlimactic, or simply unearned.
Bad endings
Stephen King hates endings. That’s a well-known fact. It is said that he can’t bear the tediousness of mapping out a plot structure in advance, preferring to rely on instinct.
“I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible,” he said in his memoir, On Writing. “Why worry about the ending anyway? Why be such a control freak?”
For those familiar with King’s oeuvre, this is the unwritten author-reader contract. We read his books for their start, middle, and, ahem … not the end. While this frustrates critics and fans alike, for many, that is exactly how we like it.
When movie adaptations get it wrong
This is precisely why there is something mildly unsatisfying with the 2025 movie adaptations of two of King’s most critically acclaimed novellas, written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman: The Long Walk (1979) and The Running Man (1982).
Both novels have dark, strange, and deeply unsettling endings that have confused readers for decades. The film versions, however, while excellent in their own way, disappoint by trying to give us the neat clarity and closure King refused to provide.
For both movies, I walked out of the cinema bewildered, almost in shock. The filmmakers failed to grasp that bad endings are an integral part of the King package, like gherkins on a cheeseburger, or pineapple on a pizza.
They say you shouldn’t fix something that isn’t broken. But with Stephen King, perhaps you shouldn’t fix what is already broken. Perhaps.
More importantly, why do we even need neatly packaged endings, with every loose end tied up?
Milan Kundera’s Immortality (1991)
I probably shouldn’t mention Milan Kundera on the same page as Stephen King. Kundera is, after all, ranked among the greatest post-war European novelists and King, as we know, has his flaws.
But when reading Kundera’s remarkable 1991 novel, Immortality, I was struck by a passage that asks what aspect of Beethoven’s music is captivating: its notes, or rather what the music represents, in other words, its vague affinity to the “ideas and attitudes” of a generation?
Can we apply the same model to King’s horror? What is the attraction: the technical craftsmanship of the writing, or what the books represent?
The Long Walk and The Running Man: When bad endings made sense
If we consider King’s writing, the words on the page do not necessarily captivate, and the consistently flawed endings noted above have frustrated many. More broadly, King is neither the most lyrical nor the most philosophical writer. He is, after all, no Milan Kundera.
Arguably, if we consider The Long Walk and The Running Man, what captivates is what the books represent: their ideas and attitudes, their affinity with the times that inspired them, at the height of the deeply unpopular Vietnam War and in its immediate aftermath. This was a period of forced conscription, national anxiety, hesitation, confusion and profound disillusionment.
The ambiguous ending of The Long Walk, in which the sole surviving protagonist is psychologically shattered and experiencing what can best be described as extreme post-traumatic stress, reflects the era in which it was written.
The brutal ending of The Running Man, in which a game show contestant crashes a jumbo jet into the skyscraper housing the TV station producing the show, likewise reflects the era in which it appeared.
Hollywood’s sign of the times
The 2025 Hollywood adaptations are highly entertaining and, in their own way, reflect present-day Trump-USA concerns. But they downplay what the source material represented, namely the bleak national mood of an earlier era.
Their eagerness to deliver neatly resolved endings is very much of our time, when technology can provide instant answers to almost everything. Oh, and apparently, audiences demand a simple resolution. But in the process, something is lost: the ineffable.
– Marshall, Brisbane, October 2026