Review: I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Review for “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” by Iain Reid (2016)

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

This is a hard book to review because it is not a book for everyone. It’s a very dark story and its ending is completely and superbly ambiguous. Personally I loved its nebulous-ness, that there’s no right or wrong answers because it all depends on what your interpretation of the events were. This book is a great conversation piece, there’s even a website with a forum where you’re free to debate with other readers on what you think it was about. Now I’m not a genius here at 29chapters…but a book that keeps people talking about it after they read it whether it was good or bad is definitely a book to read, if for no other reason then to see what the damn fuss was all about. Conversation = good literature, nahmean?

To tell you detailed info about this story other than what you’ll find on the back cover or online is to give this book away, which is out of the question for this review. I will say that it starts off innocuously as a story of a young couple’s road trip, with an unnamed female narrator who is “thinking of ending things” with her boyfriend of several months, Jake. As she ruminates over their relationship, you get this weird feeling that things just aren’t “right.” Things get really really weird during their visit to Jake’s family’s farmhouse, weirder than ever on the couple’s way back from the farmhouse, and by the ending it was so freakin’ weird that I had to reread the last 50 pages just to understand and appreciate the brilliance of the weirdness that had just been presented to me. Cleverly interspersed within this story are conversations by other unnamed narrators on the aftermath of the two main characters involved. It’s beautiful.

This is not so much a book about what happens, but more about the atmosphere and the crazy tension you have to endure to get to the end. There is a sense of dread, of something terribly unsettling in the midst of events that at first seem completely ordinary. It is not fast paced, but a slow burn of a psychological thriller. You won’t see zombies, a killer in the woods with a bloody axe, or dead bodies. The freak-out here isn’t in what you’re seeing, but in what you’re not seeing: the human condition and what happens to the mind in the state of complete isolation.

At 224 pages, this is a short book. I would recommend reading it in 1 or 2 sittings, just because you don’t want to prolong the sweet agony of reading it any longer than you need to. Five stars here. If you read nothing else this summer, read this. Excellent!