Want to be thoroughly creeped out by a book? Try ‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’ by Iain Reid

I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Iain Reid. Gallery/Scout Press. June 2016.

You will be scared. But you won’t know why…

I’m thinking of ending things. Once this thought arrives, it stays. It sticks. It lingers. It’s always there. Always.

Jake once said, “Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can’t fake a thought.”

And here’s what I’m thinking: I don’t want to be here.

In this deeply suspenseful and irresistibly unnerving debut novel, a man and his girlfriend are on their way to a secluded farm. When the two take an unexpected detour, she is left stranded in a deserted high school, wondering if there is any escape at all. What follows is a twisted unraveling that will haunt you long after the last page is turned.

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If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ll know I’m completely obsessed with creepy books! Because I read so many psychological thrillers, I’m starting to find that I don’t scare all that easy, and I’ve been on the hunt for something to genuinely terrify me. Guys, I found that book!

I became aware of this novel a couple of months ago when I saw Trang’s review over at Bookidote, and I’ve been desperate to read it ever since. I waited impatiently for its UK release, and when I downloaded it on my Kindle a couple of days ago, I was mildly horrified that I was paying over £7 for an ebook, but confident it was going to be worth every penny. I wasn’t disappointed!

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is one creepy-ass book. It’s been a while since I found something fictional so utterly unsettling. And as the blurb promises, I was scared from the very beginning, but I didn’t know why until the very end! That sounds impossible, but it’s true.

The writing style was simple, yet mesmerizingly atmospheric. Every word was chosen so perfectly as to be loaded with menace. I was completely creeped out, even by the most ordinary things. Because everything does start off relatively normally – a woman (whose name we do not learn) and her boyfriend Jake are driving to his parent’s farmhouse, where she’s going to meet them for the very first time. As they’re driving along down badly lit roads, surrounded by nothing but farmland and the gradually darkening sky for miles around, all Jake’s girlfriend can think about is ending their relationship. None of this is directly scary, but there’s such a weird, off-kilter feeling and the sense of wrongness only intensifies throughout the novel.

A lot of the story is told through the thoughts of Jake’s girlfriend, her memories, and the dialogue between her and Jake, so there isn’t much direct action (until the end… oh boy!) but somehow that didn’t make the book any less gripping. There are some parts you might find quite slow if you’re all-about-the-action… Jake’s girlfriend does a fair amount of philosophizing about their relationship, and about the concept of ‘being alone’ versus ‘being with another person forever’, amongst other complex dichotomies. However, I found these parts really interesting! It’s a book which makes you think about human nature – why we are the way we are. It explores doubt and fear and longing – the things which make us human – in all of their uncomfortable complexity.

For me, this novel was perfectly paced. It’s a short read (roughly 200 pages) and I finished it in a single sitting. The creepiness and wrongness is relentless, and it builds and builds until it’s so unbearably creepy and wrong I was literally hiding behind my blanket and jumping out of my skin every time somebody came into the room in a totally cool and casual fashion.

Despite the fairly ordinary first few chapters, normality rapidly becomes a tiny dot on the horizon, swallowed up with the shrinking sun. Genuinely creepy things start to happen… unnerving nonsensical occurrences and coincidences, combined with the inexplicably weird way Jake’s parents behave (which made me increasingly more uncomfortable the longer Jake and his girlfriend spent at the farm – I was internally screaming at them to get out of that house and back on the road!), left me physically incapable of putting the book down! I really didn’t know what was going on, or what was around the next corner, and the anxious tension and mystery of it all kept me up way past my bedtime.

Something which added to the unsettling feeling of wtf-is-going-on was that at the end of each chapter, we’d get an excerpt from a conversation about something horrific that has taken place. We don’t know who is having the conversation – the characters are unnamed – and we don’t know what’s happened, but we gradually get drip fed the details. Because I didn’t understand the context of the conversation, or how it related to the main plot thread (until the end of the book), it was jarring and unsettling, and I spent most of the book terrified of finding out.

The climax of the book has got to be one of the most terrifying, disturbing, and heartbreaking sequences I’ve ever read. I really didn’t see it coming. It was so very, very clever. Maybe it was staring me in the face all along, I don’t know, but I’m tempted to go back and read it from the beginning now that I know. I’m so, so impressed with the execution of this fantastic novel.

I can’t really say anything else about the plot because I really don’t want to give anything away – the less you know the better. All I can say is that if you’re looking for a book to scare the crap out of you, which is addictive, and which makes you think, you must check this one out ASAP!

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