Stephen King's Best (and Most Controversial) Endings

2026-10-29

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"Stephen King can't write an ending" is one of the most common complaints leveled at him, and it's common enough that King himself has made fun of it — a character in It: Chapter Two literally jokes about critics who say his book-within-the-book endings are "a cop-out." In On Writing, King is pretty upfront about why this happens: he doesn't plot his novels out in advance, he follows characters into a situation and writes to find out what happens, which means the ending usually arrives the same way it does for the reader — as a surprise, sometimes to King as well.

That approach is also exactly why his best endings land so hard. When they work, they don't feel engineered; they feel inevitable, like the only way the story could have gone. When they don't, readers feel the seams. Here's a look at both — the endings that are frequently cited as some of his best, and the ones that split his fanbase most.

The endings that actually land

Pet Sematary: the final line

Pet Sematary ends about as bleakly as a book can end, and it's almost universally considered one of King's best closers specifically because it refuses to blink. Louis Creed, having lost nearly everyone he loves to the burial ground's corrupting pull, makes the same mistake one more time with his wife Rachel — and the book's famous final line, just two words of dialogue from the thing wearing her face, is a masterclass in restraint. No monologue, no explanation, just confirmation that the cycle is going to continue. King has said this is the one novel he wrote that genuinely disturbed him, and the ending is the reason why — it denies the reader even the smallest exit. For the full breakdown of how the book gets there, see our Pet Sematary guide.

Misery: earned, not rescued

Misery works as a thriller because King traps the reader in Paul Sheldon's exact physical and psychological position for the whole book, and the ending pays that off rather than cheating it. Paul doesn't get saved — he has to out-think and out-last Annie Wilkes using the one skill he has left, his writing, turning her own obsession with his fiction into the weapon that finally gets her to lower her guard. It's a satisfying ending precisely because it's not a rescue; the protagonist earns his way out using the exact thing the book has been about the whole time. More on why Annie remains one of his scariest creations in our guide to Annie Wilkes.

Shawshank: the long game

The novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, collected in Different Seasons, has one of King's few genuinely hopeful endings, and it's held up as one of his best because the hope is earned through patience rather than luck. Andy Dufresne's escape plan takes years of digging, and the payoff — a letter, a reunion south of the border — lands because King spends the whole story establishing how much institutional grinding-down Andy has survived to get there. See our comparison of the film and novella for the handful of details Frank Darabont's adaptation changed.

It: the fading memory

It's ending is sometimes grouped with King's weaker ones because of the cosmic reveal of what Pennywise actually is, but the very last pages — where the adult Losers immediately start forgetting what just happened, the same way they did as kids — are frequently singled out as one of his most emotionally precise closing moves. It reframes the whole book: the point was never really beating the monster, it's what the characters did for each other, and the fact that the memory fades doesn't undo that. Our full plot summary and ending breakdown covers the sewer confrontation in detail.

The endings fans still argue about

The Stand: the Hand of God

No King ending gets debated more than The Stand's climax. After 1,000-plus pages building toward a confrontation between Mother Abigail's survivors in Boulder and Randall Flagg's followers in Las Vegas, the actual resolution arrives via the Trashcan Man, who drags a nuclear warhead into Vegas to make up for an earlier mistake — and a literal, explicitly supernatural "Hand of God" detonates it, wiping out Flagg's empire in one stroke. Critics have called it a textbook deus ex machina: the heroes who walked across a post-apocalyptic America to get there end up as spectators to their own climax. King's defenders point out that Flagg's hold on Vegas was already fraying from paranoia and internal betrayal before the bomb goes off, which makes the ending less about God saving the day and more about a tyrant's own followers finishing him — but the staging still reads, to a lot of readers, like King wrote himself into a corner and reached for the biggest possible reset button. For more on the differences between the original and expanded text, see our Stand uncut edition guide.

Under the Dome: the alien kids

Under the Dome spends most of its length as grounded, human-scale horror — a small Maine town cut off from the world by an invisible barrier, and the authoritarian nightmare that Big Jim Rennie builds inside it once there's no one left to stop him. Then the ending reveals the dome was placed there by alien children, playing with Chester's Mill the way kids poke at an ant farm, and the way out is essentially convincing them to stop. It's a hard pivot from political and social horror to cosmic whimsy, and it's one of the more frequently cited examples of King swapping a human-scale problem for a shrug-inducing explanation right at the finish line. Notably, the 2013 CBS series inherited the premise but couldn't make that ending work for a multi-season show, and spent three seasons building a very different, also divisive, mythology instead.

Cujo: no mercy for Tad

The 1983 film version of Cujo ends with Donna Trenton getting her son Tad to the hospital in time. The novel does not. In the book, Tad dies in the car of dehydration and heatstroke before Donna manages to kill the rabid dog standing between them and safety — a far crueler ending that reportedly earned King more hate mail than anything else he'd written up to that point. Dee Wallace, who played Donna in the film, has said she wouldn't take the role unless the ending was changed to let the boy live, and King himself backed the change for the screen. The novel's choice to kill a child on the page, with no twist to soften it, remains one of the more genuinely upsetting endings in his catalog, specifically because nothing about the story needed it that way — which is the point.

Gerald's Game: the epilogue letter

Gerald's Game spends almost its entire length as a claustrophobic two-hander: a woman handcuffed to a bed after her husband dies mid-argument, confronting her own memories while a strange, deformed figure may or may not be lurking in the dark of her bedroom. The main story resolves cleanly — Jessie frees herself using grim resourcefulness — but King tacks on an epilogue, a long letter revealing that the figure was real, a necrophile named Raymond Andrew Joubert, and showing Jessie confronting him in court. Some readers find the epilogue a satisfying confirmation that closes the loop; others feel it deflates the ambiguity the rest of the book worked hard to build, trading psychological horror for a tidier, more procedural resolution. See our comparison with the Netflix film, which trims this section down considerably.

Cell: the ending that isn't one

Cell builds an effective, fast-moving apocalypse out of a signal that turns cell phone users into violent zombies, then simply stops. The final pages have protagonist Clay Riddell handing a phone to his "phone-crazed" son on the theory that it might restore him — and the book ends there, mid-gamble, with no confirmation of whether it worked. Some readers read the cut-off as a deliberate, bleakly appropriate choice for a book about a culture addicted to the device that destroys it. Many more have called it simply unfinished, an ending that abandons the reader right as the story's central question is about to be answered.

The sewer scene in It: controversial for a different reason

Not every "controversial ending" problem in King's work is about plot mechanics. The climax of the 1958 timeline in It includes a scene — the Losers' Club, as eleven-year-olds, having group sex in the sewers as a way of finding their way back to the surface — that has been controversial since publication for entirely separate reasons, and King has acknowledged in later interviews that he's not sure he'd write it the same way today. It's a reminder that "ending problems" in King's catalog aren't only about whether the plot resolution satisfies; sometimes it's about content that was always going to divide readers, independent of craft.

Why this keeps happening

King has been fairly candid that he doesn't treat endings as a destination he's writing toward — he's said flatly that he doesn't believe in plotting things out in advance, because it conflicts with how spontaneous his process is. That's the tradeoff: the same instinct that makes his first two-thirds so propulsive and alive is the one that occasionally leaves him reaching for whatever resolution is closest at hand once he gets there. The endings that work best — Pet Sematary, Misery, Shawshank — tend to be the ones where the resolution grows directly out of what the characters have already been doing the whole book. The ones that get argued about are usually the ones where something new has to show up at the last minute to close the story out. Both kinds are part of the same writer, which is probably why readers keep having this argument four decades in. For more on how his bibliography holds up overall, see our ranked list of King's best books.