i'm thinking of ending things (iain reid): a review

 I'm Thinking of Ending Things (a review)

rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

(prospective readers should be aware that this review contains spoilers)

This book was crazy. I started reading it at night, and I didn't want to put it down, but I had to, because I thought it would be a bad idea to finish it in the middle of the night. It was just too creepy. I finished it in the morning, and it was still very spooky, so I think this was a good call.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things follows a woman and her boyfriend as they visit the boyfriend's parents, acquire lemonade from Dairy Queen, and get trapped in an abandoned school with some guy that you would not want to be trapped in a school with. There are several interludes between chapters in which random people recount the events of a gruesome murder that has recently occurred in said abandoned school. Except (and this is a major spoiler) those interludes are the only part of the book that actually happened, and the book itself is meant to be written by the boyfriend who is actually also the weird guy the couple gets trapped in the school with, and he killed himself. It's very complicated, and I'm going to explain it in a few paragraphs.

Really the coolest thing about this book is how it's scary without being extra. The first several pages are the woman and her boyfriend talking in the car about philosophy and their lives and stuff like that. There's no reason for it to be scary, but the author makes you feel unsettled without knowing why. There must be a review on the back of the book that says that. When they are at his parents' house, everyone is acting slightly odd. Especially the boyfriend. It's very interesting to watch how the boyfriend's personality changes to become more and more off-putting. At the beginning, you think he's just a normal guy. During the car ride, you start to find him sort of annoying. Then he starts acting strange, but in a very subtle way. Like, he doesn't pick up on cues that ordinarily someone would pick up on or he won't answer the woman's questions. Then he goes into a creepy abandoned school in the middle of the night in a snowstorm. He doesn't make the best decisions, broadly speaking. 

Actually, the coolest thing about I'm Thinking of Ending Things is its message that the scariest thing is not understanding yourself/not having other people understand you. So, the ending of the book (which I'm not actually sure I like) is that the girlfriend is wandering around the school being chased by a man she doesn't know and she starts to dissociate, and then the woman, the boyfriend, and the guy they don't know all fuse into the same person who then kills himself. The book is canonically written by that guy, and it's basically a character x y/n fanfic about what might have happened if he had gotten a girl's phone number who he met at a bar (so the woman who is the narrator is the woman this guy met but didn't go out with) (and it's a hypothetical story about what if they did go out) (I guess this guy's idea of a fun date is visiting his parents in a snowstorm and getting trapped in an abandoned school). This guy is super reclusive and displays an inability to connect with other people, right? So getting back to the characters in the character x y/n fanfic, the woman and her boyfriend have a lot of philosophical conversations about whether it's possible to understand yourself, or how well you should know the other person in a romantic relationship, and a running theme is that the woman is concerned that she doesn't know who she is, or other people don't know who she is. Like she thinks about this while she is being chased around an empty school by this guy (who has, incidentally, been calling her from her own phone number repeatedly saying "there's only one question to resolve"). And I just like how the fear of being misunderstood by yourself and others is mirrored by the fear of being hunted down by a creepy prank caller/fanfiction author. I don't actually think being misunderstood is the scariest thing (compared to, say, Moore v. Harper and smoke alarm jumpscares—incidentally, I just got jumpscared by the smoke alarm that says "silenced" because you can silence it when there isn't a ton of smoke which my dad installed because he kept setting off the smoke alarm with his panini. You press a button and it doesn't start screaming, but it does loudly say "silenced," which is actually not less startling. And it's scarier than being misunderstood). But I think that theme was neat. And that's the point of this paragraph.