Heads up about that popular horror novel ending everyone raves about

I visited a used bookstore in Portland last weekend and picked up a copy of "The Hollow Men" based on online hype. Got to the final chapter and the main character just vanishes mid-sentence, no explanation. The next page is a recipe for mushroom soup. Has anyone else run into this edition or did I get some weird misprint?

2 comments

2 Comments

richard_ramirez8d ago

Back in 2019 I heard a story on a podcast about a similar misprint of "The Silent Patient" where the last chapter got swapped with a chapter from a cookbook. The publisher had to do a whole recall. I bet that's what happened with your copy, some kind of bindery error where they mixed up signatures from two different books. The mushroom soup recipe is pretty specific too, makes me wonder what book it actually came from. You might want to check the copyright page and see if there's a batch number or printing date, those are usually the first things they look at when tracking down a bad run.

the_river8d ago

Yeah that bit about "signatures from two different books" makes a lot of sense actually. I remember reading somewhere that these mixups happen more often than people think, especially with indie publishers rushing things out.