I'm Thinking of Ending Things: A Puzzle Box of Existential Dread

Some horror works through spectacle—monsters, gore, the visceral shock of the terrible. Other horror operates through accumulation—wrongness building on wrongness until dread saturates every page. Iain Reid's I'm Thinking of Ending Things belongs firmly to the latter category, a slim novel that reads like a nightmare you can't quite wake from.

The setup is disarmingly mundane. An unnamed young woman accompanies her boyfriend Jake to meet his parents at their remote farmhouse. She's planning to break up with him—hence the title—but has agreed to this trip first. The drive is long. The weather is bad. Something feels increasingly, indefinably wrong.

Reid's prose is deliberately sparse, almost clinical. The narrator's voice is intelligent but detached, her observations keen but somehow off. Details don't quite add up. Her name seems to shift. Her memories contradict themselves. The farmhouse visit, when it finally arrives, is profoundly unsettling—Jake's parents are strange, the house is strange, time itself seems to behave strangely.

Interspersed with the main narrative are brief, cryptic chapters featuring someone else entirely—scenes of isolation and mundane routine that seem disconnected from the road trip narrative. How these threads connect is the novel's central mystery, and Reid plays the revelation brilliantly.

This is not a book that explains itself easily. The ending recontextualizes everything that came before, but it does so obliquely, requiring the reader to piece together what actually happened. Some will find this rewarding—the kind of novel that demands discussion, that improves on reread. Others will find it frustratingly opaque.

Charlie Kaufman's 2020 film adaptation diverges significantly, so those who've seen it may be surprised by the novel's different approach. Both versions work, but they're doing very different things with the same unsettling premise.

At just over 200 pages, I'm Thinking of Ending Things is a quick read, but it lingers. Reid has crafted something genuinely unnerving—a book about loneliness, regret, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive.