Downer Ending/Literature

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • The Pirate King by R.A. Salvatore. Duerdermont is dead, Big Bad Kensidan is now king of the city, and plans to turn into a town of kidnappers, art thieves, and any other criminal you can think of. The Lich Archmage was defeated by Robillard, but he just retreats to his phylactery, which is in the hands of his Lich apprentice. Drizzt and Regis can do nothing to help the city, and leave to try and solve a mage civil war from earlier in the book. Even the upcoming The Ghost King cannot solve all these problems.
  • The Bluest Eye ends with the main character, a little girl, being raped by her father, becoming pregnant, and turning insane. Her only friends plant some flowers in hope that the baby will be born safely. The flowers don't grow. The end.
    • Oh, and did we mention that she also goes completely insane and is ostracised by the entire town, including her two former friends who blame themselves?
  • Used greatly in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in which the decoy protagonist Bernard learns the hard way the costs of popularity and gets banished [maybe killed if you don't believe Mustapha Mond] for being an individualist. The real protagonist actually wants to leave but isn't allowed to and gives in, ultimately shaming the poor guy to the point of hanging himself
  • Virtually anything written by John Steinbeck. Not because he liked downer endings of course. He just loved inherently depressing subjects in the first place that couldn't end in anything but tragedy.
  • Also fond of them is author Cormac McCarthy. Blood Meridian ends with every character in the posse dying, except for a figure which is either the villain or the protagonist, but more likely is the villain. In No Country for Old Men the protagonist is killed by the Mexicans, and his wife is killed by Anton. The Road's Bittersweet Ending seems comparatively festive.
  • The Redwall novel Martin the Warrior has one of the biggest Downer Endings ever seen in a book for children. (Technically it's a Bittersweet Ending because the Big Bad of the book has been defeated, but that's not enough to rescue it from Downer Ending territory. Not by a long way.) The titular hero, blaming himself for the death of his girlfriend in battle, goes into exile and tries to forget she existed.
  • The novel Outsourced ends with Isaac Fisher, having finally stood up to Felix and gaining some level of understanding with his sister regarding his gender reassignment surgery, going alone to face his former employers. It turns out that he was a service clone made by his original to make him money for his own gender reassignment surgery, because of the lack of laws protecting clone rights. What follows is a scene mimicking the very first source of drama in the book.
  • Present in most of the Fantastic Comedy novels of Tom Holt. Little People and In Your Dreams stand out as having especially (even gratuitously) depressing endings.
    • The same is true of his novels set in antiquity (Olympiad, A Song for Nero, Alexander at the World's End). This might be somewhat justified by the narratives exploring various ancient philosophies, but not entirely. For example, A Song For Nero, which starts out as a relatively amusing story about two itinerant conmen having adventures all over the Roman Empire. And then in true Tom Holt fashion, everything falls apart about 3/4 of the way through the book. It's ridiculously depressing.
  • Nuklear Age by Brian Clevinger of 8-bit Theater fame. It was so bad that in lieu of an author's afterword, the author had an apology.
  • The Hitch Hikers Guide to The Galaxy: In the fifth book, Mostly Harmless, all of the main characters died (except Zaphod, who was never mentioned again after the end of the third book) in an explosion that resulted in Earth being destroyed in all possible realities. Rather jarring in a series that was mostly lighthearted comedy, if not above a little black humor. Reportedly, Douglas Adams was considering writing a sixth book to end on a lighter note, but - rather depressingly - died before he managed to complete it, or even change it from its Dirk Gently origins.
    • Fit the Twenty-Sixth of the Quintessential Series of the radio broadcast presents a different ending from Mostly Harmless; in it, most of the main characters reappear at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, including Fenchurch and Marvin. Fitting that Adams, who loved to change the story for each format, would create two wildly different endings.
    • A sixth book was written by Eoin Colfer in which most of the main characters again survive - not in the same way, although there is a Mythology Gag reference to it. The ending of the sixth book itself is fairly happy, if a little, um, gainaxy...
  • George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (written in 1948). "He loved Big Brother." Indeed.
  • George Orwell seemed to like this trope, as he did this with Animal Farm as well.
    • One of his early essays was titled How the Poor Die. The man was not a happy chappy.
  • Read Hemingway? There's even a joke about his writing: "Why did the chicken cross the road? - To die. In the rain. Alone."
    • And that's no exaggeration. One of Hemingway's most critically acclaimed shorts, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, is a prime example. You can always tell who will die horribly in a Hemingway story - it's the one who is happiest.
  • Give It Up by Franz Kafka is about a man searching for the afterlife and being told that his quest is futile.
  • Kafka's Metamorphosis features a main character who becomes a bug (literally "vermin") whose only escape from his life's horror is self destruction. With his usefulness as a breadwinner gone, his family ignores him and he dies a slow, painful death. Afterwards, his sister is marked for her money-making potential as a bride, indicating that the cycle will just continue.
    • Some people think that Gregor was insane and hallucinating being a bug, noting that no character actually directly states that he really transformed...
      • The fanfic epilogue Re-metamorphosis (not printed in all editions) has Gregor turning back into a human at the very end of the book. Although it's still kind of a downer.
  • Another Kafka novel, Der Prozess (The Trial) is so horribly depressing, it spawned the term "kafkaesque" to describe any situation that is utterly absurd and mindcrushing to anyone still sane (while everyone around you seems to accept it as natural, but doesn't tell you what is going on). The protagonist is being told he is accused of a crime but no-one he meets is willing to tell him what he is actually accused of, and when or where the trial will be, and he is stuck in a hopeless mire of bureaucracy and red tape that grows ever more grotesque.
    • Very Kafkaesque is Nathan Englander's The Ministry OF Special Cases. The humourous tone becomes crueler and crueler as the quest of the central couple to find their only son, who has been taken in by the secret police, is presented as an absurd farce. By the end, they can choose to believe the testimony of one man who claims all the missing young people were drugged and pushed from an aeroplane into the sea to drown. Or they can go on trying and dealing with the arbitrary burocracy fruitlessly, forever, in search of their boy. They choose different approaches and not even their previously loving marriage survives the book. Jeez.
  • Come on, this just applies to every Kafka piece ever written.
  • Pick a book by William Faulkner and you can easily assume that you won't feel very hopeful when the book ends.
  • The Chinese zeitgeist novel Wolf Totem ends with the protagonist killing the wolf he raised from infancy with a shovel. After he maims it by clipping the points of it's fangs off, ensuring that it can never survive in the wild. And after he lets it suffer for three days from a mortal throat wound caused by an iron chain, just because he can't bring himself to kill it. And it gets better! Due to the wholesale slaughter of Mongolian wolves, the grassland is overgrazed, succumbs to desertification twenty years later, and Beijing suffers its first ever sandstorm.
  • Rama Revealed ends with Nicole des Jardins dying painfully of a heart problem. She decides to refuse help and die rather then burdening her family. Eagle tells her the secret of life: God is an uncaring, manipulative creator who uses life to justify his universe. Death is, "...darkness...forever." Nicole sees her daughter, an octospider, her husband and a genocidal dictator die then fades out.
  • The Chocolate War ends with the hero beaten senseless in a fixed fight, the villain being given MORE influence, the only adult who isn't evil useless, the school hating the hero, and the hero ends the book with an internal monologue on the pointlessness of ever trying to defy a cruel system, and urging his sidekick to just bow down to the school's bully based dictatorship. Looking at the back jacket, in the sequel, things get worse.
    • At the end of the sequel a more villainous leader takes over the school gang, but there is hope things will change because the hero of the previous book is coming back to school and it is heavily implied he will continue to stand up to said gang.
  • China Mieville's Perdido Street Station: it is revealed that Isaac's girlfriend Lin is still alive, and he's reunited with her just long enough for her mind to be partially destroyed by the last slake moth, leaving her a slobbering near-vegetable. All of the other people whose minds were drained by the slake moths are lost causes. It is revealed that Yagharek's mysterious crime that caused him to be exiled from garuda society and have his wings torn out is rape, and even though the female garuda that was raped very pointedly tells Isaac to not judge Yagharek, Isaac refuses to help him. The book ends with Yagharek pulling out his feathers and smashing his beak, so as to appear "human". He encounters Jack Half-a-Prayer, who extends out his hand, inviting him to join his gang.
    • It's important to note that Yagharek's victim also asks Isaac not to help Yagharek to escape his punishment.
    • Isaac's descent from jolly Mad Scientist into snivelling despair at the end makes this one of the most Downer Endings he's ever seen. About the only 'good' to come out of the whole endeavour is that the city is saved, but given that New Crobuzon is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, it's hard to be pleased.
  • The short science fiction story The Cold Equations is famous for its Downer Ending: there really isn't a way to save the girl, and she goes out the airlock willingly so the spaceship doesn't crash.
  • Speaking of short science fiction stories: Stories Of Your Life And Others by Ted Chiang includes "Hell Is The Absence Of God,". A skeptic and cripple who despises God on account of all the horrible misfortunes in his life is struck by a genuine Beam of Enlightenment, which makes him love God unconditionally and supposedly guarantees his entrance to Heaven... and then moments later he dies and is arbitrarily sent to Hell, where the titular absence of God inflicts constant Mind Rape on his now deity-loving psyche... forever.
    • Stories Of Your Life And Others also contains the short "Division By Zero," which you can read for free here. Though this could more be considered a downer book, and is especially disturbing if you've studied a maths-based subject to any extent.
  • Romeo and Juliet and all their adaptions by extension. C'mon, they kill themselves at the end when if Romeo had waited just one more single minute he would have seen Juliet was not dead and they could have gone off into the sunset together.
    • One of the movie adaptations makes it even worse. Juliet wakes up while Romeo is still alive, but he has already drunk the poison. So he dies knowing that his death was completely pointless. As if the original ending wasn't enough of a downer.
    • That, believe it or not, has actually been subverted in a recent novel adaption of the story called "Romeo's Ex." The book is mainly told from the point of view of Rosaline, who, with Benvolio (and after the technical "canon" ending of the play), manages to make Romeo throw up the poison in time, saving his life. Although Juliet stays dead.
    • That's also how the opera by Charles Gounod ends. He tells her he's poisoned so she stabs herself so they can die together. Their last words are Seigneur, Seigneur, pardonnez-nous! (Lord, Lord, forgive us!).
  • For that matter any of Shakespeare's Tragedies: Hamlet and Othello and King Lear. Macbeth, despite being named as a tragedy, is really more of a Bittersweet Ending because, when you think about it, it's pretty darn happy that the Evil Overlord is overthrown and a new, fairer king is installed.
    • For the record, in Hamlet the hero manages to kill his father's murderer, but by that time the deaths of pretty much everybody else in the play have already happened.
    • Othello murders his wife because he is lead to believe that she is unfaithful, only to find out that she was not, leaving him no real option other than suicide.
    • King Lear has arguably the most downer ending of all. Both Lear and the Earl of Gloucester misjudge their children, driving away the faithful children and putting themselves in the hands of the faithless ones. Both find out how wrong they were. Both are reunited with their loving child only to die afterwards. Lear, in particular, is content to spend the rest of his life in prison so long as he is with Cordelia, only to have her murdered. (There is good reason why Shakespeare's version was almost never performed for roughly 150 years.)
  • Oedipus Rex and its sequels. Ah, where to begin. . . Basic overview: When Oedipus is born it is prophecized that he will kill his father and marry his mother. So, Oedipus is abandoned in the wilderness to die, but of course this doesn't work and he is eventually adopted by the rulers of some other state who he believes to be his birth parents. Because of this--
    • In possibly the earliest documentation of road rage, Oedipus unknowingly kills his biological father.
    • Solves the riddle of the Sphynx and unknowingly marries his biological mother and has children with her.
    • Which causes a plague to descend on his kingdom because nature/the gods/whatever are so not cool with this.
    • His wife/mother commits suicide when she realizes what has happened.
    • Once Oedipus realizes what has happened shortly afterward he finds the dead body of his wife/mother and uses the broaches in her clothing to gouge his eyes out.
    • And then the sequels become the embodiment of It Got Worse. Ouch.
  • In fact just about any Greek Tragedy fits this trope, Medea in particular in that no one learns anything from the whole business.
  • Childhood's End, by Sir Arthur C. Clarke. The Overlords cannot join with the Overmind, and are instead remembered as the "devils" who "exterminated" countless other intelligent species by uplifting them until they (the species) can evolve and join the Overmind.
    • And that's just the Overlords. All of the children in the world Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence by gaining a psychic powers and developing into a Hive Mind. No other children are born so humanity goes crazy and kills itself. Eventually the children join the Overmind by turning the rest of the planet into energy, killing the last human in the process. Sure the Overlords are jealous about not being able to join the Overmind, but anyone who is a fan of individuality and not a fan of Assimilation Plot is going to have a hard time seeing what is so great about it.
  • Flowers for Algernon in spades. The whole book itself was pretty Deus Angst Machina, but by the end when have to watch as Charlie goes back to becoming mentally handicapped, writhing in pain and dread all the way, you seriously wonder why the book doesn't burst into flames.
  • The Warhammer Fantasy Battle novel Eldar Prophecy features a civil war on an Eldar craftword. Every sympathetic character is killed off over the course of the novel, until finally the Designated Hero kills the villain... and then, in the last two pages, the Man Behind The Man steps forward and reveals that everything has gone according to plan, and they can feed the souls of all the Eldar who died to Slaanesh so that the entire craftword will be pulled into the Warp.
      • This was writen by C.S Goto and never happened
    • Fine. In the novel "Farseer" by William King, the protagonist decides to help the soul of the titular farseer so he doesn't get eaten by Slaanesh, since he's grown to trust the guy over the course of the book. Said farseer then takes over his body, imitating him so well that his friends can't even tell it's not him, with the protagonist fully conscious and aware of his situation, and then the farseer takes them on a mission that will probably get them all killed. We will never know.
    • Similarly, Fire Warrior ends with Kais, with the help of Space Marine Ardias and a few Crisis Suits defeats the forces of Chaos. However he ends up mentally broken and horrendously traumatized from his experiences.
  • Speaking of Warhammer 40K: Graham McNeill's Storm of Iron. The Iron Warriors won, all the Imperial Fist Space Marines and Jouran Imperial Guard are dead or enslaved, and all the gene-seed is winging its way to Abaddon the Despoiler for his 13th Black Crusade. Guardsman Hawke is the only real survivor. See his Dead Sky Black Sun for more.
  • Pick a John Le Carrïé novel. Even when the characters win, it's still a downer.
    • The end of The Russia House is somber but hopeful, and Single & Single has an almost unequivocally positive ending.
  • Most of Donna Leon's books. While the commissario solves the crime, it turns out he can't prosecute the perpetrators because of their political backing or similar issues.
  • Virtually anything written by Oscar Wilde (besides the comedies).
  • A lot of stories by Hans Christian Andersen. "The Little Match Girl" and the original "Little Mermaid".
    • That's probably because of Values Dissonance. As a staunch - ahem - Christian, he seemed to believe that dying well and going to Heaven was the ultimate Happy Ending.
  • The last book of the Sienkiewicz Trilogy, Pan Wolodjyowski, ends with the main character dead, along with several of his companions, and part of Poland ceded to the enemy. It is especially tragic for his wife, as the book deals with their relationship, which is very loving. This is in stark contrast to two earlier books in the trilogy, With Fire and Sword and The Deluge, both which see the lead couples get reunited and also end with victorious battles.
  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: His Godfather is killed, which is made worse when Harry finds out that he didn't even need rescuing in the first place and to make matters worse, it turns out that the weight of the Wizarding world is on his shoulders alone. And just to twist the metaphorical knife, Harry realizes in the end that he could've used Sirius' magic mirror to talk directly to him all along.
    • Phoenix is arguably a Bittersweet Ending though, since the wizarding world believes Harry in the end. Prince is a more straight example.
    • Even worse is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which ends with Dumbledore dead; Snape apparently evil and definitely a killer; Bill Weasley permanently scarred right before his wedding; and Harry, Ron, and Hermione dropping out of school to finish what Dumbledore started, knowing how slim their chances are. Harry even breaks off his new relationship with Ginny.
    • Even before any of that is Goblet of Fire, which ends with the Harry witnessing the death of a classmate (indeed the first "on screen" death in the series) and the return of Magic Hitler. Not to mention that almost no one believes him and many people think he's responsible for killing Cedric.
    • After his true allegiance was revealed, Snape's storyline arguably had the biggest Downer Ending is the entire series.
  • The Stephen King novel The Green Mile: The protagonist is forced to execute John Coffey, the black man who did not do the crime he is being executed for, but not before he's Blessed with Suck by him, and thus is forced to watch in perfect health while his friends die of old age, and is not injured in a catastrophic bus crash that takes the life of everyone else on the bus, including his wife. The book ends with his final friend, a woman in the nursing home where he lives, dying before he can tell her about his wife, and him spending his final days alone and wishing for death, but still in perfect health. As hard as it is to believe, the film was an upper ending in comparison.
  • The King novel IT also has a pretty depressing ending. The main characters, who were very close as children but then forgot all about each other (except for Mike Hanlon, who stayed behind to keep a watch over the town), return to Derry and reunite only to defeat the monster at the cost of two out of seven friends dying. Those who survive begin to forget each other again, even Mike.
    • Though not part of It itself, later works such as The Tommyknockers and especially Dreamcatcher hint that Pennywise (or one of its offspring) LIVES.
    • In the end of King's Duma Key, protagonist Edgar manages to seal away the evil Perse. However many people were lost in the struggle, including his daughter. The ending compounds this by killing off his best friend in with a heart attack, months after the final confrontation. Really, the only happy part of the ending is when Edgar writes up a hurricane, to destroy the godforsaken strip of land once and for all.
    • The Dark Half ends with Thad Beaumont sucsessfully overcoming his evil alter ego George Stark. This fairly upbeat ending was subverted by King in his later novel Needful Things, where it was revealed that Beaumont's wife Liz divorced him, after which he killed himself.
    • The ending of Cujo (not the movie): The title monster dog is finally killed, but tragically poor Tad dies of heat stroke.
    • 'Salem's Lot. If anything, the entire book is a downer as you realize that by the time the book has ended, most of the characters you've met will be either dead, or vampires.
  • Philip K Dick's short story Second Variety ends with the main character bleeding out as the first of many homicidal robots exits the Earth's atmosphere towards humanity's final holdout on the moon, using a rocket and coordinates which he unwittingly provided to it. His only solace comes from noticing that the robot carried an EMP grenade - once they wipe out humankind, they just might avenge our race by killing each other.
  • Conn Iggulden's Emperor series has quite the downer ending. Then again, the novels are about Julius Caesar and his friendship with Brutus, so it was hard not to see it coming.
    • The second novel in the tetralogy also has a downer ending, with Caesar's wife being murdered and Caesar himself being sent to Spain, having to leave his daughter behind.
  • Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo ends with all of the cast who went to battle dead apart from Tommo, and as it's stated that he's going to the Somme it can be inferred that he's going to die as well.
  • For some, the Animorphs series was a downer ending. Sure, they ended the Yeerk invasion, but Rachel dies. Tom dies at Jake's command, having never been freed from his Yeerk, and Jake is depressed. Tobias leaves to live his life as a hawk. Marco's life is bittersweet shallow. Cassie gets her dream job, but never ends up with Jake. Ax becomes a war hero, but ends up getting assimilated into the Borg. And presumably, everyone but Cassie dies in the Bolivian Army Ending.
  • The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which Esmeralda actually IS hanged, and Quasimodo goes down to die with her freaking corpse.
  • Honor Harrington, despite often being viewed as a Boring Invincible Hero, loses quite a bit when it counts.
    • Field of Dishonor ends on the field of dishonor with Honor killing Pavel Young and (temporarily) ruining her career in politics and in the Manticoran Navy.
    • At All Costs features the largest battle in Human history, with the knowledge that even their 'win' doesn't mean a thing. No one lost their shipyards and the reasons for the war hasn't changed. 2 million dead and the War just got going with the only chance for meaningful peace up in flames.
    • Storm from the Shadows: The war with the Solarian League is starting in truth and even though Manticore has better technology the Mesan Alignment is about to take out their shipyards. Worse the SL may not view it as a real war, making Manticore look bad to all potential allies if they do the deep strikes needed to win a real war, and No one knows Mesa has infiltrated everyone. Oh and a fleet of 100 SDs is about to hit the lightly defended capital of the Quadrant.
  • In Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, the protagonist Joe Bonham is introduced as an American soldier who has left behind his family and loving girlfriend in order to enlist in the army during World War I. In the opening scenes he awakens in a hospital bed after being hit by an artillery round. He gradually realizes that he has lost all of his mobility and his senses except for touch, and that he has lost his arms, legs, eyes, nose, ears, tongue, both jaws and all of his face. But his mind functions perfectly, leaving him a prisoner in his own body. The doctors have given him a tracheotomy so he can't suffocate, taking away his ability to kill himself. He attempts to talk to the doctors using Morse code in order to communicate his desire to die, and being denied that, to be shown around the country as an example of the horrors of war so that young men won't do as he did. Then they strap his head down so he can't "talk." Oh yeah, then he resumes going insane, something which was temporarily halted when he learned he could communicate in some way. It is more or less explicitly said that this is how he will live out the rest of his life. Downer Ending Indeed.
    • Then, to stop him from freaking out the nurses, they drug him with pain-killers. It ends as he slowly sinks into a haze.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde definitely qualifies. As we find out at the end the Hyde personality wins, and Jekyll spends his last hour before permanently turning into Hyde writing down the case from his perspective and hoping he finishes it before he transforms, as Hyde would likely destroy it. Then, rather than live life as a murderous monster, he commits suicide. This ending tends to come as a shock to people who haven't read the novella, since the Jekyll and Hyde duality has ingrained itself into pop culture and is more often than not played for laughs.
  • Robert A. Heinlein's short story The Long Watch, which ends with a Heroic Sacrifice and the hero's death site so contaminated with radiation from the disassembled nuclear bombs that it takes ten years before men in radiation suits can retrieve him for a hero's funeral in a lead-lined casket.
  • Ray Bradbury's short story "Mars is Heaven!" starts out as a sort of Ontological Mystery in the beginning. A crew from Earth land on Mars, which looks like Ohio at the turn of the 20th century. However, when their long lost dead relatives start appearing, it becomes more of a Lotus Eater Machine story. It ends with a sort of Downer Ending, where the town and the crew's long dead loved-ones were hallucinations made by aliens. The aliens kill everyone in their sleep, bury them for some strange reason, and destroy their ship.
    • Nearly all of Bradbury's short stories from The Martian Chronicles (published in the UK as The Silver Locusts) have downer endings. The first three expeditions to Mars are destroyed by the Martians. The first is offhandedly slaughtered by a dour Martian who believes that his wife is psychically cheating on him with the outsiders. The members of the second end up being considered madmen and consigned to a looney bin, since Martians are psychics and capable of physically manifesting their hallucinations; and are eventually pronounced incurable and executed by the doctor—who, when the "hallucinations" persist, considers himself contaminated with their insanity and kills himself. The third expedition is the aforementioned "Mars is Heaven!". The entire collection consists almost exclusively of downer endings where Martians are wiped out by human viruses, psychically torturted to death, or commit suicide; as well as humans committing murder and suicide, with the majority eventually returning to Earth to be wiped out in a nuclear war. A few stories can be said to be upbeat, particularly the last; but only by comparison to the rest.
    • A great deal of Bradbury's short stories have Downer Endings. In the collection "The Stories of Ray Bradbury", for some reason each selected story is one tale of morbidity after another.
    • His short story collection "The Illustrated Man" similarly has many Downer Endings.
    • His short story There Will Come Soft Rains is about a house that takes complete and total care of its inhabitants. However, it is unaware that the entire family has been killed by a nuclear bomb while outside working and playing. (It even goes into detail about how the remains of paint on the side of the house are shaped a little like people mowing the lawn, picking flowers, kids catching a ball, etc. The family dog comes in. It dies. The house burns down in an accident and the computer is broken, sending it in an infinite loop, repeating the day. The End.
    • "All Summer in a Day" is another short story by him, and boy, is it depressing. It takes place on Venus, which has relentless non-stop rain except one day every 7 years. Every student there was born there except Margot, a girl who lived on Earth until her parents moved to Venus. She misses the Sun terribly and is weak and sickly and hated by the other students, who are jealous that she's seen the Sun on Earth. The teacher leaves and the students lock Margot in a closet. The Sun finally comes out for the first time in 7 years, and the kids, completely forgetting her, run into the nice weather and are overjoyed. It starts raining again, and they remember Margot, opening the closet and letting out the trembling, sobbing girl who missed her only chance at Sun that she desperately needed. The end.
  • Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty ends with one of the main character's loves dead and one of them near death. He is kicked out of the house where he has lived in for the last four years. His best friend feels betrayed by him, and his other friend has betrayed him. In addition, he probably has AIDS.
  • M.T. Anderson's Dystopian future novel Feed ends with the protagonist watching over his completely paralyzed brain dead girlfriend. That's bad enough, but it's also implied that shortly after the end of the book American society will collapse and then be wiped out by an angry alliance of all the other countries in the world.
    • M.T Anderson does this in a few other places, too. Thirsty has the main character going insane(and thirsty) after realizing his entire life was arranged to carry out a plan by an Eldritch Abomination.
  • Intrinsic, no doubt, to the Horus Heresy series, as they are filling in the tragic Warhammer 40,000 Backstory. Some just foreshadow evil, but the sad endings include:
    • Graham McNeill's False Gods: Horus assassinates two people, revealing his choice.
    • Ben Counter's Galaxy In Flames: A full-blown The Bad Guy Wins, with the only consolation being that the good guys are not all Dying Alone.
    • Graham McNeill's Fulgrim: In a battle full of treachery, Fulgrim kills Ferrus Manus; consumed by guilt, Fulgrim is tricked into letting a daemon possess him. It traps him, aware of all that happens and unable to act, for all time. Horus is horrified and declares that he will figure out a way to rescue Fulgrim and deal with the daemon—after his revolt.
    • Dan Abnett's Legion. Let us count the ways. The Alpha Legion turns traitor to ensure Chaos destroys itself by eliminating humanity itself. The Imperial Guard they brought with them are either killed when they blow up their ships or doomed to die a horrible death on the planet itself. John Grammaticus commits suicide by throwing himself out of an airlock because his best friend and his lover have betrayed him and he has doomed humanity to extinction. Oh, and all of this doesn't prevent the vision the Cabal have seen, it ensures it.
    • Graham McNeill's Battle for the Abyss: All of the heroes in the book die, many hating one another's guts after being relatively strong comrades to begin with. Almost all of them die pointless deaths, attempting just to slow down the planet killer they are trying to destroy. It takes an utterly suicidal attack to finally successfully board the ship, in which more than half of the remaining loyalists are killed or forced to turn their guns on one another by psychers. In their final moments they just about manage to succeed. Why is this a downer ending rather than a bitter one? No one will ever know of their actions, no one will remember their names or recall anything they did. They lost everything and had everything they were destroyed. Their victory was giving one loyalist legion a very slim chance at surviving a massed sneak attack by two traitor ones.
  • In James Swallow's Warhammer 40,000 novel Deus Encarmine, Rafen is forced to pledge himself to Arkio as the reincarnated Sanguinius. Which is the point at which he realizes that they will meet at some point and one will die. And Arkio is not merely a fellow Blood Angel but his brother. Though this being a two-part series, this has shades of a Cliff Hanger.
  • "All Quiet on the Western Front."
  • In Gav Thorpe's Warhammer 40,000 novel Angels of Darkness, Boreas comes to the conclusion that the man he tortured and interrogated (and condemned to a Fate Worse Than Death) was right: the Dark Angels have committed themselves to the wrong path. He convinces the Dark Angels with him to remain in a hermetically sealed fortress, so they will not release a fatal virus on the planet, even though they will die themselves, but he knows the message he sends to the other Dark Angels will not convince them. Rather than face what they could do when desperate for air and food, commit suicide together.
  • The Dresden Files aren't the happiest books in the world, but book 11 ends on a really depressing note. Sure, they found the traitor on the Council, but the whole thing was a set up to get the Black Council's guy on the Senior Council. Morgan, who was a Jerkass but a completely loyal one, is dead. Anastasia Luccio, the woman Harry has been dating, turns out to have been mentally coerced by the spy into the relationship in order to keep an eye on Harry. And Harry's half-brother, Thomas, has given into his vampire side after being tortured by the skin-walker and fed humans by it, and has returned to the White Court.
    • If you think that is Downer Ending. Read the Next Book. For starters - Harry's Car, Office and Flat gets blown up.. Oh and Susan turns and Harry has to kill her....Oh and he kills her for genocide-black-magic-ritual . OH and he is also Winter Knight now....and quite dead from getting shot in the heart by a sniper....just a few minutes after he starts some sort of romance with Murphy...OUCH...
  • Lady: My Life As A Bitch ends with Lady trying to be accepted by her family, which seems to lightly work, until her older sister Julie convinces them otherwise. Lady is then rejected by them, with her family coming to the conclusion that she's a mad dog, and call the police to have her taken away and euthanised. Before the police come though, Lady escapes with encouragement from Mitch and Fella, herself having taken on a light view of Humans Are the Real Monsters, and runs off with them. She's stuck as a dog forever, and earlier in the book when she just lived life as a dog, Lady lost herself, forgetting all human life and it's memories, which is probably going to happen again. Oh, and Terry's still around, turning people into dogs if they (accidentally or not) get him angry, with no cure.
  • The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas definitely counts as the two main characters end up being gassed in a concentration camp while being completely unaware of what is going to happen to them. What makes it even worse is the fact that the non-Jewish boy was only in the camp to help his friend find his father who is "missing" and it is very clear to the reader that his father is in fact dead.
  • Beggars Ride by Nancy Kress, last book of Beggars trilogy, ends in one of these. the Supersleepless are all dead(though samples of their sperm and eggs survive), most of the Sleepless die when Sanctuary is destroyed unreconciled with the Sleepers(though its better than if they had survived unreconciled), last bookd panacea(the Cell Cleaner which makes a person immune to almost all diseases, cancers, arthritis, skin blemishes, ect. as well as allowing said person to subsist on skin contact with dirt and sunlight) is unavailable to future generations, and an engineered virus(which is able to work around the Cell Cleaner) has infected a significant part of the population with a disease that causes a fear of novelty(worst than it sounds).
  • Among the Horatio Hornblower series, Ship of the Line has a downer ending: The Sutherland is heavily damaged, forcing Horatio to surrender, Bush has lost his leg, and both of them are prisoners of war.
    • Lord Hornblower wasn't much better. Hornblower's mission was a success and he was raised to the peerage because of it, but Bush, the closest person Horatio had to a friend, dies in the process. Then when Napoleon escapes and Horatio tries to escape, he fails, and in the process loses his mistress. Only news of the Battle of Waterloo saved him from dying again.
  • The Lorax by Dr Seuss, that tiny shimmer of hope does not make it a Bittersweet Ending.
  • Pretty much all of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion books consist of grim stories of war and betrayal, followed by downer endings; most notably the Elric of Melnibone books. The Eternal Champion himself is doomed to find only strife and pain in all of his manifestations; too never be at peace, but eternally seperated from anything and everything he loves. Mercifully, only one incarnation, Erekose, is even remotely aware of this destiny; but he has enough Wangst about it to make up for the rest.
    • Corum Jhaelen Irsei has a Bittersweet Ending in the Swords Trilogy: he is still maimed, but his human lover is alive, not all his people were exterminated and are gradually recovering from the devastation, and the Lords of Law and Chaos are no longer able to meddle in mortals' lives.
  • Edgar. Allan. Freakin'. Poe.
    • The Pit and the Pendulum isn't an example, as the protagonist is rescued at the end. For ultra-depressing, Tear Jerker downer endings (and middles, and beginnings), though, there's nothing like his poetry.
  • Chuck Klosterman's debut novel, Downtown Owl. 2 out of 3 of the main characters focused on are killed in a deadly blizzard...and they're both rather young. The one that survives is well around in his late 70s early 80s. And it also includes a fake newspaper article explaining how nearly half of Owl's population was killed (about 800 live in Owl).
  • The Canadian novel 'Tent Of Blue' by Rachel Preston, though it borderlines with No Ending...
  • Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby goes downhill rapidly in the climax as a series of unfortunate circumstances occur: Daisy Buchanan accidentally drives over Myrtle in Gatsby's car, Tom convincing Myrtle's husband that Gatsby was the driver, causing him to murder the depressed Gatsby, and then shoot himself. Daisy and Tom return to their extravagant lifestyle, leaving Nick all alone to wonder what in the world happened. Hardly anyone attends Gatsby's funeral and Nick reflects on how much rich people suck and how Gatsby was stuck in the past the entire time.
  • The Iliad ends with Hector's funeral—sure, they got the body back, but you're just treated to another funeral of people ripping their hair out in misery.
  • Less down than most of these, more on the par of the Star Wars movies, where things look bad but surviving heroes are determined, but take a look at the last scenes of Dark Force Rising, second book of the Thrawn trilogy. After a hard battle and three Big Damn Heroes moments, the New Republic is barely, just barely able to survive an Imperial trap. The New Republic and the Empire had been in a race of sorts to get to the long-lost Katana fleet of heavy Dreadnaughts, and in the aftermath of the battle the heroes find that while they'd been fighting among Katana fleet Dreadnaughts, there were only fifteen there. Out of two hundred. You Are Too Late, indeed. The heroes try to console themselves, saying that the Empire is strapped for crews and won't be able to scrape together four hundred thousand people to crew the Dreadnaughts anytime soon. And then they take a look at the bodies of the Imperials they just killed. They are all clones. Meaning that the Empire has found a new stock of Spaarti cylinders, and it won't take years to find and train crews. Maybe only months. Maybe not even that long. This Is Going To Hurt.
    • Outbound Flight is this or bittersweet, depending on who you ask. No one clearly, unambiguously good is around at the end of the novel - the two essentially good main characters either left back in the first half or died in a Heroic Sacrifice that preserves the last fifty survivors of Outbound Flight, which originally had fifty thousand people on it. The woman who sacrificed herself got another character to promise her that he'd send back a message to her brother, who hated her. And from Survivors Quest we know that those survivors and their descendants curse that woman's name for abandoning them, that no one ever learns what she did, and that the man she extracted a promise from set up a criminal organization and didn't so much as think about her request for fifty years. Damn, Lorana, you got the short end of the stick.
  • Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance. After years of struggle for the four protagonists, when their hard work finally starts paying off and everything is looking up for them... Mistry completely ruins it for them, leaving them in a situation worse than the one that they started with, proving one and for all that life is out to get you.
  • Iain M. Banks's Against a Dark Background. The protagonist saves herself at the end by killing the Big Bad, who is also her last surviving relative. Before this, everyone she cares about, and in fact every single main character (and most of the secondary ones), has been killed... pretty much all because of her.
  • Tolkien's The Children of Hurin (and the condensed version of the same story found in The Silmarillion). Húrin and his brother Huor fight in the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, where Huor dies and Húrin is taken prisoner by Morgoth. Húrin refuses to tell Morgoth the location of a nearby Hidden Elf Kingdom, so Morgoth curses his family, and forces Húrin to watch the unfolding misfortune playing out on Túrin, his son, and Túrin's sister Nienor. By the time the story ends, Túrin has killed his best friend accidentally, taken a kingdown to its fall, failed to save his girlfriend, and unknowingly married Nienor. When she finds out, Nienor throws herself off a cliff (whilst pregnant with Túrin's child). Túrin kills himself with his sword. His father, no longer a prisoner, accidentally leads the enemy to the city he had tried to protect in the battle, and then he and his wife find their children's tomb; soon after she dies of grief. Hurin tries to avenge his children's death but only succeeds in bringing down a curse on another Hidden Elf Kingdom, and is finally told by Melian that he's only helping Morgoth with his actions, and he kills himself. The End.
  • I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Just see the trope named after it.
  • Kate Chopin's The Awakening has protagonist Edna committing suicide when, among other things, she realizes there's no way to reconcile her sense of self with the social expectations of her period. She drowns herself in the ocean, which is especially poignant as learning to swim was the one time Edna derived satisfaction or a sense of freedom from just about anything. Of course, Edna was an incredibly controversial character at the time period, so many readers were SATISFIED when she offed herself.
  • Night by Elie Wiesel ends with Elie looking at himself in the mirror and seeing something that looks like a corpse. And he's already lost his home, family, and possessions. And gone through the Holocaust as a Jew.
    • Actually his two older sisters survived and they were reunited at an orphanage. So he still had some family
  • John Brunner's novel Total Eclipse is mostly an old-fashioned novel about an archaeological expedition to an alien world, albeit with Earth civilisation in a tumultuous state. The scientists solve the puzzle and contact Earth ... to discover that civilisation back home has collapsed. They try to establish a colony on the new world ... and everyone dies of an unstoppable illness.
    • And this is a happy ending compared to his "The Sheep Look Up" concerning environmental collapse and its consequences. By the time you get to the end of the novel you realize that everyone - the good, the bad, rich, poor, the characters you've come to despise and the characters you've come cheer for, every one is dead, or dead and worse and the scariest thing about the novel is that, as noted by William Gibson, of all speculative fiction written this 1972 novel comes the absolute closest to dead-on predicting the world we live in ... right now.
  • George Eliot's The Mill On The Floss ends with Tom and Maggie Tulliver drowning unexpectedly in a flood.
  • Notes from the Underground ends when, after finding the one person who doesn't hate him, the Underground Man retreats from society once again, sullen and depressed from the whole experience, having had a mutual experience of Humans Are the Real Monsters
  • Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Jude dies alone, abandoned by the woman he loves, all three of his young children dead in a murder/suicide, while his wife who tricks him into remarrying him is off flirting with someone else.
  • William Gibson and Michael Swanwick's short story, Dogfight. The protagonist succeeds at his ultimate objective (defeating the local champion of a holographic, mentally-controlled battle game featuring WWI fighter planes), but immediately afterwards realizes the price he paid to do so was too high: stealing a piece of game-breaking technology from his only friend to give himself an advantage (psychologically scarring her in the process, due to a chastity implant her parents gave her that gives her a crippling fear of being touched by men) and alienating himself from the rest of the bar's patrons by robbing the game's champion (a quadriplegic war veteran) of the only pleasure left in his life. What good is a victory when you have no one to share it with?
  • The second book in The Princess Series, The Mermaid's Madness. The princesses discover that the mermaid princess Lirea, who attacked the Queen with a magic soul sucking knife and is trying to start a war between merpeople and humans, is not the real villain of the story. She has been under the influence of a spell cast by her grandmother Morveren that is slowly driving her mad. Morveren is killed and the spell broken but the experience has left Lirea's mind shattered. She is now confined to a tower by the sea with only the occasional visit from her sister to help her recover. Also, the queen they were trying to save, as a result of the attack she now only has a little over a year to live. They stopped the war but thats about the only good to come from this.
  • Go Ask Alice. At first you think it is going to be a happy ending with the main character changing her life for the better. But then in the epilogue, you find out that she died three weeks later of an overdose. Total wham ending.
  • The Popol Vuh, book of belief of the Qechua (descendants of the Maya) and one of the few complete documents about Mayan mythology and history, has one of THE most downer endings, especially within context. Basically, the whole book tells the history of creation as written in Mayan myths, along with the adventures of heroic archetypes Ixbalanque and Hunahpu, the creation of the Qechua empire and the bloodline of kings. Then the writer, an anonymous Indian that wrote the book after the conquest, finishes with: "And this was the existence of the Qichés, for now the (original) Popol Vuh of the kings can't be seen, as it has disappeared. And so, all those of Qiché are gone." The whole culture basically went to hell shortly thereafter.
  • The Lies of Locke Lamora. While Locke and his best friend Jean escape, they are never allowed back in Camorra, the rest of the Gentlemen Bastards die, Locke is severely wounded, Jean is wounded, they're both exposed and possibly on the run from the law, and every friend (and enemy) they had in Camorra is currently dead due to their actions, both in the (pointless) nobleman con and the Grey King job. Among the most shocking of these is when the crime boss' daughter, who wasn't even involved in the mob war is shoved into a funeral casket full of horse urine and drowned.
  • Roy Hobbs strikes out at the end of The Natural. This gets inverted big time in Robert Redford's film adaptation.
  • In the short story The Dumpster, a young girl lives with a horrible family: father is a fat, lazy slob who punches old ladies, mother is a shrieking, vain harpy who hates on her daughter, brother is a high-school drop-out who beats kids up and runs over cats (on purpose). The girl is the only decent member of them all. One day, a giant dumpster appears in their yard, and the girl later sees her family go inside and be taken away. At first, she's happy, because she's free of the family's horrible reputation and free of the Emotional Abuse they heap onto her, and the same magic dumpster gives her a new family...But it turns out the new family is creepy as hell while still being "perfect," and the girl is now forced to get perfect grades, look perfect, do her chores perfectly, and if she makes one little tiny mistake, the dumpster will take her away too. The poor kid is reduced to a terrified, blank-faced slave, possibly forever. And for no damn reason.
  • Mockingjay. Primrose dies, as well as some of Katniss's friends and allies, one of whom had recently been married. Katniss murders the President who took over and is deemed insane.The only happy part is that Katniss marries Peta and they have kids, but that's not particularly cheerful either. Why? Well, let's see...Katniss is still haunted by the nightmares that make her thrash around at night, Peeta was tortured to the point where even years later he still occasionally looses grips with reality and wants to kill her, and they both know that one day they have to explain their participation in both the Hunger Games and the war to their children. Cheerful.
  • Nobody Lives Forever by Edna Buchanan: Poor Dusty gets brutally murdered by a psychopathic madwoman for no good reason. Jim, in the depths of despair over the injustice of it all, gives into temptation in a moment of weakness; he immediately repents of what he did, and resolves to return the money he stole, only to drop dead of a heart attack and have his body looted by a mob of the people he's spent his life serving and protecting. Laurel finally discovers that she has multiple personality disorder, and finally has the chance to get the psychological help she needs, but her most psychopathic personality, Alex, takes over and breaks out of the facility where she/they were being held, only to be shot and killed by Laurel's fiance Jim; the Alex and Harriet personalities deserved to die, and the Marilyn personality was no sweetheart, but the Jennie personality, as well as the main personality Laurel, were both innocent, and the only reason Laurel was mad in the first place was because she was horribly abused as a child. Jim, the only survivor, loses Dusty, the woman he really loves, without ever having the chance to apologize to her, he loses his best friend Jim, he loses his career, he probably can't ever show his face in the neighborhood that was his home for his whole life, and he has to shoot his fiancee. This is a sad ending.
  • Master of Many Treasures by Mary Brown. At first it seems like we're going to get a perfectly happy ending; the main character's section of the book ends with her going off to get her happy ending with the love of her life that she's spent two years searching for. Then you reach the epilogue, and another character takes over to reveal that immediately afterward she was burned alive by dragons.
  • Metro 2033 ends with Artyom finding out that he's literally 'The Chosen One', who is meant to serve as a bridge between mankind and the Dark Ones, so that both species can work together to create a brighter future. All throughout the book the Dark Ones were only trying to get in contact with the humans, not attack them. However... In the midst of this revalation the Dark Ones are all destroyed by missiles, (all thanks to Artyom's help prior to his findings), and a broken and despondent Artyom heads back to the Metro. And just to top it off, his adoptive father is most likely dead, and he can't go home due to the future destruction of a tunnel to VDNkh (which is essentially death for a station).
  • French Canadian writer Patrick Senecal has got to be the king of downer endings:
    • 5150 Elm street: The crazy father kills his little girl with a rifle, his wife hangs herself, the kid he was holding captive loses his mind is eventually found by the psychopath daughter, who proceeds to castrate him. And she manages to get away with it.
    • Oniria: Everyone dies except for the main character and his psychopath "true" self.
    • Sur le Seuil: The entire supporting cast is brutally murderer or commit suicide, taking with them a busload of innocents, and the main character is left tourmented for the rest of his life. And Evil lives on. Yay.
    • Le Vide: Life is empty.
    • Aliss: Bittersweet. Aliss is exiled from Wonderland, but manages to recover from her experience, find a husband and is expecting a baby. Later on, she tries to find the entrance to Wonderland again but cannot, concluding that it's because she "isn't running anymore". She doesn't know if she should be satisfied or depressed.
  • Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness At Noon ends with the protagonist, after being interrogated by former friends, being shot as a traitor and lamenting that the same fate will come to pretty much everyone he has ever known.
  • White Bim Black Ear by Gavriil Troyepolsky. A little dog's search for his master, who's been taken to hospital for heart problems. After many breathtaking and exciting adventures, encounters with kind and evil people, the dog dies a miserable death just before his master finds him.
  • Scorpia ends with Alex being shot by a sniper and, apparently dead. The only way to know he survives is from the fact that the series continues for four books.
  • The Women's Room by Marilyn French, although it's not as extreme as some of the other examples listed above, but it's not exactly happy either. Although some of the group - Iso, Clarissa and Kyla - do get relatively happy endings, others don't. Lily is, as far as we're aware, still in a mental institution. Grete is unhappy in her relationship. Chris's fate remains unknown, Val is dead, and Mira spends most of her time outside of work wandering around on beaches. And one only wonders what happened to all the abandoned housewives in the first part of the novel.
  • Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space trilogy is like this, with the Distant Finale basically meaning the universe is doomed to be utterly stripped of life by rogue Von Neumann machines.
  • There's a picture book for small children called Tadpole's Promise. It's about a tadpole who falls in love with a caterpillar. She was his beautiful rainbow, and he was her shiny black pearl. But she makes him promise he'll never change, and of course he starts growing legs. So she leaves him, and cries to herself to sleep in a cocoon. When she wakes up, she's a butterfly, realises people can't help changing, and flies off to look for him and forgive him. He's now a frog, and not recognising her he swallows her whole and then sits there sadly remembering his beautiful rainbow.
  • Zigzagged in the kids' book Wolves. It's about a rabbit who borrows a book about wolves from the library (which is cleverly presented as a book within the book) and reads it while walking home...being followed by a wolf. He gets to the bit about wolves eating rabbits, the wolf rears up behind him...and the next page is just the back cover of the book, scratched and bitten to shreds. The author then presents a happier ending for sensitive readers, where the wolf is a vegetarian. But then the last page shows letters piling up unanswered on the rabbit's doormat, including a late notice from the library. It's genuinely depressing.
  • Burnt Shadows ends with the protagonist's son being (unjustly) detained as a terrorist, leaving her completely alone in the world.
  • How To Steal A Dragon's Sword ends with Hiccup on the run from both dragons and vikings, having been (along with Stoick) driven out of the Hairy Hooligan tribe, with only Toothless, the Windwalker and the Wodinfang for company. Also, the dragons have turned on the vikings and are subsequently are at war, Alvin the Treacherous is king of the various viking clans and has almost all of the various items that Hiccup had accumulated over his previous escapades, and Snotlout is now chief of the Hooligans. Compared to the rest of the endings in the series, it's pretty jarring.
  • A Dog of Flanders: Nello is born as a poor orphan who lives with his grandfather. He wants to win a drawing contest to gain some money, but loses. Then his grandpa dies and he is homeless. He finally goes to the cathedral of Antwerp, where he freezes to death in front of a large painting by Peter Paul Rubens.
  • Artemis Fowl: The Atlantis Complex has Artemis contract a mental condition of the same name that usually only strikes magical beings, but he has contracted it due to his abosorbing a small amount of magic. The symptoms escape This Troper at the time, but they are not good. Well, the team (Holly, Artemis, Butler, Juliet, Mulch, and Foaly) take down Turnball Root and save Atlantis. Sounds good right? But there's two HUGE problems: Opal Koboi's past self (long story) is still in the future, and Artemis STILL has Atlantis Complex. Given the fact that there is no eighth book in sight could mean that Atlantis Complex is the series finale, this is a rather worrisome ending.
  • Happens a LOT in books in the Goosebumps series, which is rather surprising for a children's series.
  • A the end of Divergent, most of Abnegation has been killed by the mind-controlled Dauntless, the Tris had to kill Will, And Tobias and Tris are factionless.
  • Jaqueline Carey's duology, The Sundering, in which all but one of the protagonists end up slain after having their stronghold sacked, and the last survivor is the crippled one.
  • Émile Zola's Therese Raquin ends with the title character and her lover going mad and committing suicide. Her aunt dies shortly after with no one to take care of her.
  • "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce. A soldier is hanged, but escapes after falling into the water and finds his family. Just kidding! The whole story was a fantasy that took place between the time he was hanged and his neck was broken.
  • The children's picture book Matilda Who Told Lies and Was Burnt to Death ends exactly how you think it ends.
  • Beachwalker ends with the protagonist losing her beloved patient, then dying herself shortly afterward. Made slightly less sad by the ambiguous sensation of fingers closing around her hand just as she dies, implying that they are Together in Death.
  • The Godfather. Michael reasserts the Corleone family's dominance with a Roaring Rampage of Revenge at the cost of his soul.
  • The Go-Between. One character is dead by his own hand, another is faced with a loveless marriage of convenience, and the central character is emotionally scarred for life to the extent that he will be unable to form meaningful relationships.
  • Arguably, Someone Elses War is a successful blend of this trope and Earn Your Happy Ending.
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