The ending of Skippy Dies is definitely not something you could have predicted 100 pages before it happened. Honestly, reading the book I never thought about it ending. It was a long book, that not so much told a story but told many stories, including all the normal days that happened in-between them. For me, reading this book (something I haven't done since last school year) reminded me why I like (or rather 'used to like') reading so much. Murray is an excellent, intelligent writer. But anyway about the ending!
Carl, the degenerate, was driven mad by his guilt and was seeing the dead boy, Skippy, everywhere. Reuprecht, Skippy's overweight scientist roommate, stress-ate and desperately tried to communicate to Skippy with increasingly insane experiments. Lori, Skippy's girlfriend, was also feeling guilty as she cheated on Skippy. She started taking diet pills and eventually had to be sent to a clinic as she was too sick to even stand. Everybody at Seabrook thinks Skippy was molested by Father Green before he died (even though, while very tempted to, he didn't). Carl, while on Heroin, is told by Skippy that he has to kill the "final demon", which Carl interprets to be the priest. Carl goes to the school and sets fire to Father Green's office, killing him. Carl eventually realizes that the demon is himself, and so he lays down in the smoke to die. However, he is rescued by the history teacher Howard Fallon. Reuprecht, who had recently ruined a school concert by trying to send an extremely loud musical message to Skippy, visits Lori. Reuprecht is planning on running away to Stanford, and Lori is planning on committing suicide. They have a long conversation, Lori talking Reuprecht out of moving away, and in that convincing her not to take her own life. Reuprecht leaves his box of stress-eating donuts behind, and Lori starts eating them.
The message that came out for me in the entire third part (called Ghostland, taking place after Skippy's death) is that you cannot run away from the past. All of the students and faculty at Seabrook experienced this after Skippy died. While everybody else tried to cover it up, Howard was the only one who would deal with it. And yet, Howard was dealing with another form of running away. His relationships would immediately get boring because he was always looking for someone who would take him somewhere better; he didn't want his girlfriends to be just as bored as he was. This kind of running away, I think, is the moral of the book. Life's not going to be as good as anybody hoped, and it'll get no better elsewhere (well, said in a less depressing way).
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