You will be scared. But you won t know why In this deeply suspenseful and irresistibly unnerving debut novel, a man and his girlfriend are on their way to a secluded farm. What follows is a twisted unraveling and an unforgettable ending that will haunt you long after the last page is turned. Jake and a woman known only as The Girlfriend are taking a long drive to meet his parents at their secluded farm. But when Jake takes a sudden detour, leaving The Girlfriend stranded at a deserted high school, the story transforms into a twisted combination of the darkest unease, psychological frailty, and a look into the limitations of solitude. With remarkable, masterful skill, Iain Reid builds a plot that steadily crescendos into a harrowing ending one that will have you at the edge of your seats and one that you will never see coming. Reminiscent of Jose Saramago s early work, Michel Faber s cult classic Under the Skin, and Lionel Shriver s We Need to Talk About Kevin, I m Thinking of Ending Things is an edgy, haunting debut. Tense, gripping, and atmospheric, this novel will pull you in from the very first page and will never let you go.
hmm, okay, so, while this book was really good, it still left me kinda disappointed. my big complaint is that it takes way too long to get going. we get to the second act 40% in but even then there’s no real action. in hindsight that info from the first act was necessary but i just wonder if it could’ve been done better, especially because there is a frantic race to the end in comparison. maybe that’s unfair, but i had higher expectations for this aspect i guess. this is an intellectual book, full of philosophical musings, but i wanted a little more action for a psychological thriller.
reid is a master at building suspense and unease. the execution in that sense is simply brilliant, but i felt a bit deflated by the “twist” that I guessed less than halfway through, that was really more of a reveal.
that is really all i can say without revealing too much. i think even the synopsis says too much. this is one of those books where it’s best to go in blind, and i think maybe i knew too much about it and that coloured my experience. i think you’ll probably want to talk about it right after you finish, though, and Simon & Schuster has set up a website purely for discussion after finishing (all the spoilers allowed!), called, fittingly, afterthingsend.com.
