How Does Dreadful Night End And What Happens To The Protagonist?

Question

Just finished reading Dreadful Night and my heart's wrecked! Seriously, what's the final fate of the main character after that wild climax? No spoilers beyond the ending, please!

Rivera Iian Jhon · Answer

I’m going to skirt around this one a bit to avoid spoilers. Often the dreadful night is ultimately brought to a close with the immediate danger to the protagonist having been lifted, sometimes at great personal cost to them. After that, the protagonist is left changed – either having grown in some way as a result of their ordeal, or else having been irreparably damaged by it. An example of the former is ‘Revenge of the Night’, in which a catastrophic betrayal is slowly avenged by the heroine over the course of years, not through any overt display of strength, but rather through her cold, calculating patience. The story’s payoff comes from that long-term game having been played out.

Noah · Answer

I was half asleep on the couch when I finished reading Dreadful Night. The ending of the protagonist was so unexpected and it hit me like a cup of cold coffee. He didn’t die in some kind of explosion, but rather he disappeared into obscurity. Although he was alive in body, the rest of him had died. There would be scars left behind in the town, but they would heal. He’d saved the world from something terrible, but in doing so he lost his place in the world. The town would move on in time, remember the event in quiet respect. There would be a small patch of ground dedicated to his memory.

I would love to read about the days of the main character, after they had saved the world from the monstrous otherness. Their heroism is certainly not cinematic. The most powerful sign of what they had done to change things is the memory of a small act of kindness to another person and how a child remembers that act of kindness many years later. The heroism of the main character is messy and lonely.

Bennett · Answer

I read Dreadful Night between shifts at work. I was surprised by the lack of a triumphant rescue for the protagonist. In the end, they traded their future to save the town, and spent their last days of freedom walking through a fog that devoured memory one by one. But there were hints of the legacy of this bitter, sad person after the story was over: a child finding a trinket in the ashes, a bench with carved initials in a park. It was sad, but somehow hopeful too. Even though this person was erased, their kindness would continue to affect the world in small, scattered ways. Reading that book was like losing a friend – but the friend's laugh would stay with me.

Jack · Answer

I got up late to read the last few chapters of ‘Dreadful Night’ yesterday evening. It was a dark, rainy night and I stayed up to finish it. That ending was a bittersweet punch to the gut. Instead of a showdown in the dark of the decayed church with the source of the town’s nightmares, the ending is a sacrifice instead. The protagonist locks themselves in whatever rift or mirror it was that spawned the horrors instead of escaping with the knowledge that the darkness will follow and haunt the people they love.
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Quiet. Strange. The final scenes of 'Dreadful Night' are followed by no fanfare, no music, no parade. Instead we find the protagonist of the novel tracing the outlines of a long-dead woman in a faded black-and-white photograph. He apologizes to her for something or other. The town wakes up the next morning to find the sun shining with an unusual brightness in the sky. But for some reason, nobody feels quite the same as they did before. In the end, love triumphs through the actions of one man, but it is not necessarily triumphant in a cinematic sort of way. I closed the book feeling strangely warm and hollow. Finished a long conversation that had changed something fundamental but in a subtle way.

Nathan · Answer

I read Dreadful Night as both a critic and someone who loves a good tragic arc. The ending was inevitable, yet so well paced. The main character comes to a moral crossroads and chooses containment over a more traditional heroic resolution. Mechanically this resolves the supernatural plot, but thematically it brings up some very interesting questions about responsibility to help and the merits of erasure.

In terms of plot, it worked well for the protagonist to survive but be changed forever. This means we can’t imagine her returning to her pre-Rift life, and her story can continue in some way. In terms of world-building, it was clever to leave the energies of the Rift unexplained, with only remnants left behind. This provides plenty of scope for future stories, including sequels and spin-offs. It was a clever and emotionally resonant ending, and I can see this being the subject of many essays and discussions, not least whether the protagonist’s sacrifice was always going to happen or whether it was arranged by fate.

Simon · Answer

I’ve been trying to think of ways to write an ending to a story that doesn’t wrap up in a neat bow and give the protagonist a victory parade down the main street of wherever they’ve been fighting. ‘Dreadful Night’ is about a protagonist who has managed to survive but at such terrible cost that he’s been left with nothing. The final scenes of the book show him walking out of the ruined manor in the glowing of the sun. But his memories are in tatters. He recognizes faces but can’t remember the names of the people he’s spotting. He leaves town under an assumed name, occasionally tackling dark and malevolent forces that return to wherever he is. Sometimes he’s able to manage to stave off the shadows but at others he’s not even able to recall the reason why a particular place fills him with a sense of dread.

What's particularly good about the way this book views survival, though, is that it acknowledges that it's a complicated and ongoing process. (The book's closing notes offer an alternate reading of the protagonist's "survival" -- that he or she actually died and what we read was his/her survivors' grief-transformed into myth. Which is to say that the book leaves a lot of room for potential sequels, and for reader theory and for late-night re-readings of particular sections and of the whole, etc.) etc. Which is my favorite kind of ambiguous closure.

Michaella Rodchelle Cañete Occeña · Answer

Using the ancient evil’s deepest fear against it, the modern technologist lures it into the complex data trails of a modern electrical grid. There, it is drowned in a tidal wave of information, and the primitive creature suffers a fatal system crash. The night ends with a blackout and the acrid smell of burned electrical components. A triumph of modern ingenuity over magical ancient terrors.

Alan Rasof · Answer

Plot-wise, they collect the three items, read the binding verse at the appropriate time, and eradicate the primary entity. The house stops leaking from the walls, and all ceases to whisper. The protagonist is battered but unharmed, and exhausted. The remainder of the book is spent with them attempting to return to normal, and with one of the found objects glowing softly in a drawer. Nice and “endings”, but setup for a sequel.

Almi Almaz · Answer

The time loop is revealed at the end of the book. The dreadful night the main character went through is a glitch and he was stuck in it. The last chapter of the book mirrors the first chapter. There are big differences though. In this version the main character knows what is going on and he uses all his knowledge gained from all the other failed loops to say the right thing to the side character at the right time. The cycle is then broken and the main character wakes up on the morning before that terrible night started. It’s a hopeful yet haunting way to end the book.

Jhunfheng Medallon · Answer

This ending examines the costs of curiosity. Throughout this story the protagonist probes into things that he should leave alone. In finding the closure to the ritual that he has uncovered the protagonist realizes that he is not the hunter, but rather a piece on a board. He has closed the ritual, but is left psychically scarred. Now he is able to perceive the ‘dread’ that has hovered over the edge of reality in this story as a constant background hum in his normally rational world. He is safe, but he can never go back to not knowing. In this way his victory is a life sentence.

Crustycloud · Answer

A very quiet ending to a really tense movie, set to a completely different tone after the intense scenes of terror that had preceded it. The night had ended when the main character broke their isolation and got the help of the right people. A scene of a support group, where supernatural trauma survivors share their stories of recovery from their experiences. A message of community and shared burden. And slowly but surely the main character is healing. It wasn’t dramatic, but it was real and somehow uplifting.

Pamela Porath Mlostek · Answer

Many of the theories I read for this film were along the lines of the protagonist being the source of all the dread because of their guilt. And the way the film wrapped up did sort of support this. The protagonist defeats the night by finally dealing with the repressed trauma of his sibling’s death that he felt responsible for. And when he forgives himself, the dreadful occurrences all cease. It was a really emotionally earned moment and not at all how I expected the film to end. Some fans felt that it was a bit corny, but to me it was perfectly fine.

Ricardo311264 · Answer

The finale of the story is a battle of wills against dread, not physical strength. The protagonist cannot fight dread in physical form, so they have to find a way to outsmart it within the boundaries of its rules. Ultimately, they succeed in trapping it in a paradox, bringing an end to the night as the entity ceases to exist logically. The protagonist is left intellectually triumphant but emotionally drained and numb, having to think in extremely alien and amoral terms to save the world. Yet, in saving it, they lost a piece of humanity. Cool philosophical angle.

How Does Dreadful Night End And What Happens To The Protagonist?

13 Answers

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