You know that feeling. You finish a book, close the cover, and something feels… off. Not unsatisfied exactly—more like a quiet alarm going off in the back of your mind. The story didn’t wrap up. The threads weren’t tied. You’re left with a question that won’t go away: Is that it?
That unease? That’s not a bug. It’s the whole point.
M. John Harrison has spent a career writing novels that feel like they’re disassembling themselves as you read them. His latest, The End of Everything, is a masterclass in the art of the unresolved. But calling it ‘weird’ or ‘difficult’ misses the mark. What Harrison is actually doing is far more radical: he’s showing you that the desire for a neat ending is a fantasy—and that traditional literary realism is the real fiction.
Let me say that again, because it’s the kind of sentence you want to screenshot and send to a friend who worships at the altar of Chekhov:
Traditional literary realism is the true fantasy. The uncanny is just reality without the lies.
Think about it. In real life, people don’t get three-act arcs. They don’t have epiphanies that neatly resolve their childhood traumas. They don’t get a final scene where all the loose ends are tied with a bow. Real life is messy, chaotic, and—most importantly—unresolved. Yet we’ve been trained to expect that stories should provide closure. We’ve been sold a bill of goods that says a good story must have a satisfying ending.
Harrison’s work is a slap in the face to that expectation. He uses the uncanny not as a genre trope (no ghosts, no monsters) but as a literary tool. The uncanny, in his hands, is the feeling of the familiar suddenly becoming strange—a door you’ve walked through a thousand times that now seems to lead somewhere else. It’s the moment you realize the narrative you’ve been following is a house of cards.
I saw this firsthand when I read Light, his earlier novel. The book opens with a spaceship pilot who might be dead, a physicist who might be losing his mind, and a plot that seems to be about… something. But by the time you’re halfway through, you realize the plot isn’t the point. The point is the vertigo. The point is the feeling of falling through a story that refuses to catch you.
That’s what makes Harrison’s work so difficult to market. Publishers want books that fit neatly into categories: ‘literary fiction,’ ‘science fiction,’ ‘horror.’ Harrison’s work sits in the cracks. It’s not scary in the traditional sense, but it leaves you unsettled. It’s not confusing for the sake of being confusing—it’s confusing because confusion is a more honest response to the world than certainty.
If you’re someone who reads for escape, for the comfort of a tidy resolution, Harrison is not for you. And that’s okay. But if you’ve ever felt that the stories you consume are too clean, too neat, too easy—then you need to read him. He will not give you closure. He will give you something better: the permission to sit with the unresolved.
We don’t need more stories that tie up loose ends. We need stories that teach us how to live with the loose ends.
This is the provocative truth that Harrison’s critics miss. They call his work ‘weird’ as a dismissal. But weirdness is just the name we give to reality when we stop pretending it’s a story. The next time you finish a book and feel that quiet alarm, don’t reach for another. Sit with the discomfort. That’s where the real insight lives.
Harrison’s The End of Everything is not a book you enjoy. It’s a book you experience. And if you let it, it will change the way you read everything else.
Because the happy ending is a lie. And the truth, however unsettling, is the only thing worth reading.
FAQ
Q: Isn't this just a defense of confusing, poorly written books?
A: No. There's a difference between deliberate ambiguity and incoherence. Harrison's work is meticulously crafted to create a specific emotional effect—the feeling of the uncanny. It's not that he can't write a clear plot; it's that he chooses not to, because clarity would be a lie. The confusion is the point, not a failure.
Q: What's the practical takeaway for a reader who wants to enjoy Harrison's work?
A: Stop expecting a payoff. Read for the atmosphere, the sentences, the discomfort. Let go of the need to 'understand' the plot in a traditional sense. Instead, pay attention to how the book makes you feel. If you can sit with that feeling without needing to resolve it, you'll get more out of Harrison than any conventional novel.
Q: Isn't the desire for closure a natural human instinct? Why fight it?
A: It is natural, but it's also a cultural script we've been taught by centuries of storytelling. The problem is that this script often prevents us from engaging with art that reflects the actual messy nature of existence. Rejecting closure isn't about being contrarian—it's about expanding your capacity for complexity. Sometimes the most mature response to a story is to say, 'I don't know, and that's okay.'