When does a book end? There are quite a few answers to this question.

2. When the author finally stops tinkering with it. It takes some authors many, many redrafts to feel that a book is finished. Sometimes it’s more like quitting, than any sense of completion. Some books are never finished, and so the rest of us never get to read them, they hover in book limbo, an idea that doesn’t quite fruit. Of course when the author does finally take their hands away from the keyboard and stop tweaking the tale, that’s the beginning of the process of the story becoming a physical book.
   
3. On the last page, just before the tell-tale words ‘the end’. Unless of course it doesn’t, because it could be one of those ‘to be continued’ cliff hanger endings and you might have to wait years for the next one, and sometimes authors die and you never find out what was going on. Even books that end at the ending might feel unfinished. It might be more like stopping, or falling off something than a proper ending off. It could equally be so tidy that it feels a bit unreal and unsatisfying that way instead.
   
4. Sometimes books are extended far beyond the author’s ‘the end’. Think of what happened to Connan, to H.P Lovecraft, for that matter, to every book that becomes a film, a TV series, a franchise of some sort and lives on in remakes and revisioning. Perhaps it would be fair to say that these books don’t properly stop, and sometimes the endless re-boots can be really annoying with all due reference to cartoon characters from the mid twentieth century who refuse to die.
   
5. Then there are those other books, the ones with a strange kind of magic that allows them to lay little eggs inside your head, such that they never quite end. Instead, they move in, inviting you to wander around their worlds, wonder what happened before, and after and during and in the next field over and so forth. These books don’t stop because readers don’t let them. They live on in fan fiction and art, in playground games and daydreams. And of all the ways not to end a book entirely, I think this is the best.

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