 Hi everybody, welcome back. So if you missed my last discussion video then I am trying out this new audio-only format and it is actually kind of nice on me because it's a little bit easier to edit and I can like have my notes just sitting out in front of me while I talk about this so that's that's kind of nice but with that out of the way who doesn't love a good cliffhanger right? Because I mean when you get to the end of a book and you just want to immediately read more or there's a huge twist that completely changes up the story I mean who doesn't love that? It makes you immediately want to go ahead and read the next book in the series and so I just wanted to talk about like the best ones out there I mean the absolute best of the best cliffhangers that I have ever come across in my life and so let's get started it's a top 10 list I think you know how these work by now the rules here are that one these are all my opinions you know it's based on think things like the oh shit factor or the reveal of new information how much it makes me want to read the next book right away you know those sorts of things and only one per series because if I didn't do that then half of this list would be taken up by just a couple of different series and obviously spoilers ahead for all of the following series I will put them on the screen now and if you want to leave you should probably do so now because now we're going to get started okay so number 10 is the great war american front now this book is one of the southern victory series which I did the world building analysis on a little while ago and I will do a review of the books eventually I'll I'll get around to it but the thing about this one is that this is the one where world war one starts and you see the united states and the confederate states go full on at war with one another while the world is tearing itself apart and the thing about this series is that most of the books are about the world and sometimes about the characters rather than any sort of plot you know it's just looking at how the setting evolves over time and occasionally how different characters will turn out and one of the many many characters that this book follows is a black servant in south carolina named scipio and scipio is a house servant which means that you know he's actually a little bit more educated and he's definitely definitely treated better than all these servants that have to work out in the fields who are not much better than slaves and throughout the book he interacts with another field servant named cassius and cassius and him have known each other since they were kids they've been friends forever and he sees cassius has become a marxist a communist over the past couple of years and he's also starting to radicalize a lot of the other servants and he's talking about like there will be a revolution soon we are going to throw off the okubara pressers and scipio is definitely not on their side he's trying to prevent conflict because he doesn't want to get caught up in it and he's convinced that people are gonna get killed of course there's already a giant fucking war going on so it's not gonna make much difference either way and so at the very very end of the book the revolution starts cassius and a bunch of the other servants rise up they kill their masters they burn down the plantation house and it's made clear that a lot of other black folks are doing it all over the south and scipio has just caught up in it and i'm sorry that that wasn't that funny but it really is just an oh shit moment because you're not really expecting it to happen all at once the way it does and not only that but the ending introduces like more of an actual plot into the story like it introduces more of a okay so something is going to happen which is going to cause something else to happen you know point a b c uh and it also makes it a hell of a lot more uncertain as to where things are going to go next so because of that i think that this one at the very least deserved an honorable mention but like i don't think i could have put this one anywhere else on the list because like i said the this book isn't really plot based so while it did make me want to read to find out what would happen to the world it wasn't so much about the characters and what they were going to do so this one it's on the list but it is kind of low number nine shadows edge which is book two of the night angel trilogy okay so a quick summary for those of you who haven't read it uh the first book in this series is about this guy named kylar training to be a magical assassin under a guy named dirzo and later part of the book is all about him trying to find this magical artifact called a kakari and it supposedly gives people like crazy powers makes them immortal etc and near the end you find out that dirzo actually has a kakari and so the book ends with dirzo and kylar having one last duel and kylar kills dirzo and he takes the kakari and he becomes an immortal night angel the second book involves him going on this whole long mission to assassinate a king and you know that's not really important the important part is that at the very end of the book he actually digs up dirzo's grave and finds out that he's still alive i know that that might not seem like a whole lot if you haven't read these books and don't get me wrong i i think these books are kind of overrated i think they have a lot of issues but that ending came way the fuck out of nowhere like i was very thoroughly convinced that dirzo was dead for good by that point uh and so when you find out oh okay he's still running around somewhere that's really unexpected and really exciting like i immediately wanted to say well what's dirzo doing now what's he gonna do next so that one i mean i i don't think i could have had a list without this one on there because that is definitely one of my favorite cliffhanger endings in epic fantasy or well okay night angel isn't epic fantasy it's more grim dark fantasy so it's one of my favorite cliffhanger endings in grim dark fantasy number eight persie jackson and the olympians number four the battle of the labyrinth okay so if you're not familiar with the persie jackson series it's basically a series about uh kids living in the modern day who are connected with ancient greek mythology and apparently ancient greek mythology is all real but it's moved over from the mediterranean world over to the united states the main plot of the series is about how chronos who was the father of zoos and a bunch of other gods uh he was killed way way long ago except he wasn't really killed because he can't really kill a god uh and he's now trying to come back and take over and the main character persie is a demigod he's the son of persiden and a mortal woman and he and all of his demigod friends have to stop him so the battle of the labyrinth is actually the second to last book in this series and throughout the series one of chronos's main servants who's been helping him out is another demigod named luke who for a couple of rather complex reasons it actually wants him to come and take over and that's not the important part the important part is that uh in this book they need to go through the labyrinth and prevent chronos and his army from invading uh the main half blood camp through it and so they eventually succeed however they find luke's body has kind of been taken over by chronos and that luke himself is kind of dead and while they do stop his army from destroying their camp right away chronos is now back he like he's back for real and his army is gathering strength and they're ready to attack they're ready to take over so this is pretty great mostly just because the the villain's finally there okay like they've been teasing him for a long time he's now he's now there and you see how powerful he is and the final battle is right around the corner and again you know how powerful his army is because they fought it several times and every time they've either gotten their asses kicked or they've just barely managed to hold it back with huge losses so this one again it's way up there in wanting or in making me want to read the next one especially back when i was a kid when i first read it and i had to wait a whole fucking year until the next one came out can you believe that but yes it's just amazing in that regard and it's well it just got me excited that's that's all there is to it number seven a torch against the night so these books again i did a world building analysis on them and while i thought the world was pretty shitty i think the books overall are really really great uh so if you haven't read them the first book is about a girl named lia whose brother was taken in the middle of the night by the military for some reason she doesn't know why and her grandparents are killed and she's almost killed but she manages to escape so over the course of the first book you find out that her brother has knowledge on how to make this thing called seric steel and seric steel is this very very strong type of steel which is held in very very top secret conditions by the marshall empire and if that if the rebels against the empire could somehow get a hold of weapons and armor that are made of seric steel then they could actually properly fight back and so that's why her brother is so dangerous to them and he gets hauled off to prison and you know basically the entire plot of the first and second books are about her trying to get him back but there's other stuff going on as well like there's a military commander who just called the commandant who is working with this guy called the nightbringer who is the king of the jinn and all the jinn in this world have been imprisoned for several centuries but the nightbringer is trying to bring him back and so during the second book the commandant commandant just starts a genocide against the scholars who it's kind of a shitty name is the thing because the scholars are actually an ethnic group that lia belongs to who are basically just slaves in the empire but i don't know whatever i've complained about stupid names in this series before but anyways the commandant starts committing a genocide against them and it's really widespread and a whole fucking lot of them are dying and while all this is happening lia starts to form a relationship with a boy named kenan and at one point he gives her she gives him this amulet that she has and when he touches it it turns out he's the nightbringer and the amulet is actually part of a key which will allow him to free all the imprisoned jinn and then they're gonna come out and kill all the humans so you know that's that sucks and also while this is happening lia's traveling companion named elias gets poisoned by the commandant and he's slowly dying like it the poison takes several months to kill him and so from near the beginning of the book you know like yeah he's fucked and he doesn't die exactly see he runs into this ghost lady who man how do i even explain this without explaining the plot of the whole book but basically he runs into this ghost lady who is the i guess she's like karon in greek mythology where she guides the souls of the dead to the next life and so she actually manages to keep him from dying and she uses him as basically an assistant but he's also going to be trapped in the forest where all the dead souls go for all eternity and they do manage to break lia's brother out but he's not he's not mentally well he's not physically well he's unresponsive they don't know if he can actually make the sarah steal for the rebels and oh man just everything is basically going wrong everything is going to shit the characters they just seem totally fucked i mean there's nothing good about what's happening to them at this point in the story and it really really really makes me want to read or made me want to read more to find out what happened and i mean i don't want to talk too much about the book after this but i do think that the series would probably have worked a little bit better as a trilogy at least that's how i feel now but anyways let's move on number six in-depth ground okay so this is a pretty obscure series i know there there's probably not many of you who have read it before but basically they are a series of military science fiction books and they're told out of order you know what chronologically i think it goes two three four one uh and then there's other books after that but i haven't read any of them but uh anyway so this one is about humanity's first contacts with this alien race who they decide to call arachnids aka bugs and immediately assumed like as soon as they make contact the bugs don't even try to communicate with them at all they just attack like they just attack they make huge progress they kill a shitload of people they like they take they take over planets it's it's absolutely horrifying uh and part of what makes it so bad is that the bugs will just take crazy crazy losses that humans would never find acceptable but the bugs just sort of shrug it off and actually i think the bugs are a really well done version of a hive mind i i really do think that like it's one of the best hive minds i've ever seen because they don't have any individuality whatsoever but it's also not as simple as they have a queen kill the queen and they all die it's it's a lot more complex than that it's basically an entire civilization with one mind it's really really fascinating but uh back on track so they're actually forced to bring an admiral named evan antonov out of retirement to help them fight the bugs which uh again if you haven't read the books uh antonov was one of the main characters in the second book and you know you saw his military genius and all that in that one so you understand that this is a serious situation if they feel they need him so a ways into the book they find out that the bugs actually have a backdoor church and without going into too much detail basically there was just a hidden wormhole that was in the alpha centauri system and so the bugs can go to the alpha centauri system which is like the center of human space like that it's it's almost like a railroad hub there's a whole bunch of wormholes there that they can send their ships through to travel all over the place and it's only one warp away from earth so if the bugs take over that system then that's going to just completely split human space up and they will not be able to properly fight back at all so they just build up the humans just build up this giant fleet and send it through the wormhole and try to attack the bugs there before they get the chance to attack back but it turns out to be a trap their whole fleet is fucking destroyed and scattered antonov is killed and the book ends with the bugs starting to attack alpha centauri now that's actually a bigger deal than it sounds because the earlier books were totally self-contained whereas this one is actually building up to something like when you first read it you're kind of thinking like okay how are they going to turn this around until the last couple of pages and then you realize oh shit they say this isn't over yet and that last just the last moment of the book where the bugs come through and humans are like oh fuck it just start fighting start killing start just fire everything we have uh that ties into the title because the title comes from a quote from sun zoo and i'll put it up on the screen here and basically what the quote means is that when things get really really bad all you can do is fight for your life like there's no time for planning there's no time for preparation or strategy or anything like that just fight or you'll die and so while this series does have some issues which i i might talk about them one day because it has some weirdly fascist undertones and stuff but i don't know that that's a that's a discussion for another time let's uh that cliffhanger though that immediately makes you want to read more that the oh shit factor is absolutely gigantic so i do feel that it does belong this high on the list number five the mark of athena yeah okay i know the heroes of olympus is a sequel series to persie jackson but they're still technically different series so you know bite me and while the first one was all about cronos coming back and trying to destroy all the gods this one is about gaya mother earth coming back to life and to make a long story short uh in this book they have to go to mount olympus in order to try and stop gaya but before they can do that they need to find this giant statue called the athena parthenos and that's somewhere in rome they don't know exactly where it is but that's along their way to mount olympus so they decide to go there and while they're in rome they managed to find the statue and they also find arachne who's the goddess of spiders and uh well if if you hate spiders as much as i do that's immediately just horrifying and they managed to defeat arachne and get the statue and they defeat arachne by pushing her into this giant pit which leads all the way down to tartaris which is the deepest darkest part of the underworld where all the most horrible monsters and gods are imprisoned and they managed to throw arachne down there but she also manages to pull persie and anabeth down with them and well that that's not good i i don't think i really need to explain too much about why this is such a good cliff hanger i i really don't it's just it's an oh shit moment it's really exciting makes you want to read more let's uh let's keep going number four necropolis so the power of five is another not super well known series i don't think but basically it's about five kids with crazy powers who were reincarnated in order to defeat these creatures called the old ones and the old ones are just uh i don't know they're never really that well explained but they're basically just these demigod-like beings that want to destroy the world or actually they don't even want to destroy the world it's just their nature they're going to destroy the world if they don't stop them and uh well i'm making it sound a little bit more interesting than it really is there but anyways uh and by the end of the third book four of them have all come together but necropolis is about the last one and her name is scarlet by the way and it's all about the others trying to find her but it also follows her own storyline there and basically it's about her going to hong kong but the old ones have already basically taken over the whole city and they're trying to catch her and she's trying to get away and you know standard action adventure fantasy stuff right and by the end they all come together and they're heading to go to a magical door so that they can escape from the city and that the reason they have to do that is because there's this massive typhoon that's approaching hong kong and they're like well we can't take a boat we can't take a plane we can't stay here certainly so let's just get to the door and they make it to the door but right before they get there one of the old one's servants shoots scarlet uh but then they manage to get through the door but then the storm comes in destroys the entire city and it also destroys the door which causes some sort of like i don't know magical space time rift or something which causes them all to wind up going to different locations all over the earth shit that's uh that's not good oh yeah and also the king of the old ones is uh is free now so you know he's he's coming around he's he's gonna fuck shit up it's not good basically uh that's another one that's uh if you've read the series i don't think i need to explain that much it's uh the world's about to get destroyed and they're all scattered and it's not good number three zombie bride okay so this whole list could have been taken up by darin shan books if i really wanted to in fact this whole list probably could have been taken up by endings of the zombie books honestly because they're they pretty much all end with some sort of cliffhanger uh and i can't really explain the plot to the people who haven't read it because the thing about darin shan's books is that they're so fucking weird and out there that if i tried to do that then well we would we'd be here all day okay there were nine books before this one it's just just no basically the main character is a zombie and her name is b and she is fighting against this crazy mutant guy who will just call mr dowling and he has this virus that will kill all humans and b needs to find that virus so that she can destroy it and at the end of the book right before this zombie family she actually gets kidnapped by mr dowling and taken to his base and over the course of this book she finds out dowling doesn't hate her in fact he's weirdly in love with her because he's i don't know he's kind of crazy and weird like if you read the book at all you'll figure it out pretty quickly what i mean but basically at the end they wind up actually getting married but b attacks him knocks him out and finds out where the virus is so then she goes out grabs it takes it and runs off but immediately afterwards dowlings men find out what happens and they pursue her and it just ends and i think this one has to be this high on the list just because it makes you want to read more more than i think almost any other book on this list it doesn't have quite the oh shit factor of the of the number two and the number one choice of those so that's the only reason it's not higher number two the demon nada blood beast death's shadow and dark calling okay so this one this one's cheating but like again i could have filled this entire list up with darin shan books and i didn't want to just do three separate demon nada entries and these are all more or less on the same level so i think i can combine them all together so again this one i can't really explain the plot because we'd be here all fucking day but basically blood beast which is number five in the series ends with the main character grubs on a plane getting attacked by demons and oh yeah he also might slowly be turning into a werewolf and losing his mind and well that that's not good death shadow which is number seven in the series is i think it's a little bit better but not enough for it to really warrant being it on a higher part in the list so basically uh baranibus who is the leader of all the human magicians in the world he's dead he gets killed uh and they also find out that the embodiment of death is after them and i don't mean embodiment of death in the sense of like okay it's a hooded figure with a skeleton hand and a scythe no no i mean this thing is just imagine a billowing mass of smoke that's constantly moving if it even touches you it will burn through your skin burn through your flesh burn through your bone you will die immediately if it touches you uh and they don't know what it is when they first see it they just know it's leading demons to attack humans uh and they find out at this point that it's actually the embodiment of death because death used to just be a force in their universe it was just like gravity or time or something you know it didn't have a mind it just was but they accidentally did something which caused it to awaken and then it created a body for itself out of dead souls like it's not made of smoke it's made of dead souls and that's how the book ends their friend is dead they're running off to try and lick their wounds and then they find out oh shit that that's what's after us okay that's not good and then dark calling which is number nine the second to last book in this series that's that's oh man every time you think things can't get worse in these books they they get a whole lot fucking worse so basically uh in during the course of this book you find out that not only are demons going to invade the human universe but they are going to destroy every planet with intelligent life on there slowly over the course of millions of years and then not only that but one of their friends beck betrays betrays them and goes to work for the demons uh a whole bunch of their other friends are dead you know not just baranibus but uh grubs his uncle named dervish uh his girlfriend just a shitload of their friends they're all fucked uh and then they actually meet baranibus's ghost briefly and he basically accepts that yep the uh the world's ending that kind of sucks but uh you know well we're we're fucked just just enjoy it while it lasts and baranibus spent centuries upon centuries fighting against the demons and he even even he's just given up hope at this point so that's that's not good and one of the characters named colonel actually tries to run off he's like okay well we're fucked i'm gonna try and save as many people as i can but then grubs in his you know werewolf state just says nope we're not doing that so he actually gouges out his eyeballs and takes him hostage and tells him like nope you're not leaving you're you're staying here you're gonna help me fight whether you want to or not uh i don't really know the words to describe the emotions that i felt upon first reading this uh but i'm gonna try and sum it up here holy shit the fucking world is ending endless hordes of demons can't are coming we can't fight them all our friends are dead we are fucked we are so fucking fucked and number one which i don't know i i think this one i don't think this one's gonna get me a lot of flak but number one is caliban's war which is the expanse book number two i know i did a discussion not long ago about how the show is basically the best book adaptation ever but i think one area where it really dropped the ball was by not ending a season with the ending of caliban's war because i mean don't get me wrong they ended in episode with that and watching other people who hadn't read the books freak out for a week about what was going on was really cool and really funny but i mean if i had been able to watch them for a whole year freak out and try and theorize about what was going on and what what the thing was that was coming off of venus i would have been so happy to do that just so happy but for those of you who have not read these books or watched the show basically an alien virus that completely breaks the laws of physics comes into our solar system and it kills everything it touches as well and they manage to crash it onto venus and keep it away from you know any human settlements or anything but then while it's on venus it starts building something and every time they try and get closer to investigate it their ships get destroyed and at the end of caliban's war whatever it was whatever it built on the surface rises off the planet and start flying through space now the protomolecule which is what the alien virus is called when that first appears there's already a lot of questions that that raises but when you see it build this and then send it flying through space a million more questions go through your head head you know what is it where did it come from what's its purpose who made it what's going to happen to humanity in the wake of this like are we all going to die are we going to find a way to fight back against it do we want to fight back against it is are these things even human or sorry they're obviously not human but are these things even life as we know it or are they some sort of gods like never never never after reading a book that's part of a series have i wanted to read the next one immediately afterwards the way i did when i read this don't get me wrong the demonata also did that a lot but this one comes with a lot more shock and a lot more surprise at it like i i don't know what i was expecting to happen with the thing that the protomolecule was making on venus but i was not at all expecting that and i was also very very satisfied by what it turned out to be there you have it those are my top 10 book cliffhanger endings uh if you didn't like it well tell me what you would put on here tell tell me what some of your favorite cliffhanger endings are uh and you know if you're going to do spoilers in the comments please you know please please mark those uh and if you liked this video be sure to well you know i i wish there's a way you could show your appreciation like you know i wish there were some buttons along the screen somewhere where you could like i don't know subscribe to my channel or something so you could see more or maybe like the video so that everyone knows hey i really liked this thing or or you know i wish i kind of wish i had a patreon page maybe so you could donate to me and help me continue making footage videos like this but yeah you know that that that's just silly uh surely that wouldn't happen but you know i'll i'll see you some other time bye