Recommended Reading: I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS

Iain Reid’s 2016 psychological horror masterpiece I’m Thinking of Ending Things is probably my favorite book of all time. I’ve read it three times now this year alone, and even after diving into it that many times, so much of it remains a mystery to me. Every answer it provides just gives more and more questions. For some this type of ambiguity can be annoying, but I love it. What I love even more though is the feeling of pure dread and pain that seeps through almost every page, and how once you get to the end, it changes everything.

I’m not going to try and dissect the contents of the book or try to take some kind of academic lens in order to figure out what’s really going on. No, instead I’m going to do what I do best. I’m going to ramble on and on to help me process and maybe even deepen the feelings it burned into my brain. It would be really hard to get to the heart of why it made me feel the way it did without spoiling things. So this will be divided into both non-spoiler and super-spoiler parts. The non-spoiler part will most likely be more focused and mainly will be me blabbing about what makes the book great from a literary and horror perspective, while in the super-spoiler part I’ll be in full-on rant mode exploring some of the ending and getting a bit personal.

One other final note, I’m probably not going to be able to say everything I want to say in this one post, so I’ll probably end up writing several more at some point where I try and dig a lot deeper into the themes and story. In fact, I’ll definitely be doing that sometime.

With all that out of the way, let’s hit the road to the unknown.

Non-Spoiler

A lot of the plot involves spoilers. So, I’m going to keep the summary as vague as possible as to not give anything away. I’m Thinking of Ending Thing’s follows an unnamed narrator and her boyfriend Jake as they go on a road trip to Jake’s family farm so the narrator can meet his parents for the first time. The basic plot is honestly fairly simple. There are very few characters, and only about four major locations. When the story doesn’t take place in the car with the narrator and Jake, the setting changes from the farm, to a Dairy Queen, and then finally to an abandoned high school. The narrator also keeps getting unsettling phone calls and voice messages from a stranger she refers to as The Caller asking for the answer to a question she doesn’t know. Spliced between the chapters are back and forth conversation of people who have discovered something disturbing, but much like The Caller, it’s not a huge focus until the last dozen or so pages of the book.

Sometimes simple plots can put people off, but here it’s not about the plot. It’s about what’s going on both underneath and on-top of it (I know that sounds weird, but hopefully it’ll make more sense the farther I get into this). I’m Thinking of Ending Thing’s is a book that prioritizes feeling and emotion over everything else, and not a single page is wasted in that regard.

What this book really does incredibly well is that it gives the reader a sense that something is off, but never telling us what. Throughout the entire book there’s this lingering feeling of dread and unease that bleeds through the words. I was felt on edge and uncomfortable, but I didn’t know why. You’d think too that by the time I’d finished the book I would have understood why If was feeling that way, but if anything, I understood far less than I thought I did.

This is the type of story that washes over you as you read filling both your head and heart with an overwhelming sense of, well, I’m not really sure how to describe it. The thing about feelings is that they can be really damn hard to put into words sometimes. If I had to choose one word to describe the way I’m Thinking of Ending Thing’s made me feel, it’d be violating.

I felt as though the book was creeping its way into my mind and burrowing itself under my skin. It felt like, at more times than I can count, that the book knew me. That it knew exactly what buttons to push to get inside my head and turn it inside out. Not only that, but it made me feel like I was guilty of it too. Like I was reading something I had no right to read.

For example, once the couple reaches Jake’s family farm, the narrator immediately feels a sense of unease. She feels like she doesn’t belong, that she isn’t meant to be there. By doing so, what Reid does is make us as the reader feel the same way. I felt as though this story was not meant for me, and that by reading it I was being almost invasive. Just as the narrator felt like an alien on a completely different planet, I felt like an unwanted fly on the wall of a home I had no business being in.

The thing is, that feeling of me being a violator started far earlier than it did for the narrator. From page one I felt like I was peering into someone’s deeper innermost thoughts. Their insecurities, flaws, trauma, and just about everything that makes a person a person were put on the page. It was almost as if I were inside someone’s secret inner life.

All of what the book is trying to accomplish wouldn’t be nearly as effective if it wasn’t for how Reid crafts his narrative and the way he uses language. He writes in a way where words in phrases that might seem insignificant at first get new life brought into them the further you get in the story. The conversations between the characters could easily come off as pretentious, but the way they’re written is how people actually talk, which makes them feel real and not like some deep, contrived meditation on whatever.

To me though, the most incredible thing Reid accomplishes is creating an ending that changes the way everything that comes before is read, making it to where you can read the book over and over again and take something new from it each time.

Speaking of the ending, I think it’s time to get to it. So if you’ve read the book, go right in. If you haven’t, I suggest staying away from this section until after you’ve read it. However, if you don’t care about spoilers, by all means do whatever you want.

SUPER-SPOILER SECTION

If anything, at least to me, I’m Thinking of Ending Thing’s is a warning. It’s a warning about not letting your anxieties control your life, and to not allow yourself to sink into such a deep internal fear of the dreaded “what if” that your life doesn’t even feel like your own anymore. Jake is a character who is so consumed with regret that his life becomes forfeit and frozen in place. It’s also very clear that somewhere in his past he was abused, was never given the help he needed, and had to face it all alone. Because of this, he became a man completely and utterly consumed by his own despair and sank into a hole he couldn’t see a way out of.

Living without regret isn’t about not having regrets, it’s about taking the chances you want to take no matter how afraid of the undesired outcome you might be. It’s a warning that if we let that negative voice in our head that tells us we can’t grow too big, there may be no coming back. People always say it’s never too late to change, but for someone whose pain has outweighed their hope, being able to live their life a new and better way doesn’t even register as an option.

The people who found his body asked why he didn’t get help, and the answer is pretty simple, it’s because it’s hard to be able to get help when you don’t feel like anything will. He wanted help, the whole story was a scream for help, he just didn’t know how to make that scream be heard. The more he wrote the story, the more he came to the conclusion that there was only one option left for him. For Jake life was over, all he had left to do was take the final step.

It wasn’t one thing that lead him to his end, it was everything, every little thing over time that just built up more and more until it was so overwhelming he couldn’t take it anymore. There was no straw that broke the camels back, the back was already broken. I know what that’s like, to feel like there’s this weight on your back that you just can’t carry, but you feel like you have to, until you don’t.

Fortunately for me, I’ve had people in my life to help me back up when I fell down. Jake didn’t have anyone, his anxiety took away all of his agency, he became a slave to it. He is a prime example of what can happen when severe mental illness goes unchecked and untreated. Everyone knew there was something off about him, but no one wanted to make it any of there business. If just one person had asked him how he felt, maybe things could have been different. I guess that’s another thing it’s trying to warn us about, that we should watch out for each other, and when we see someone right in front of us who clearly needs help to help.

The more I’ve thought about this as I’ve been writing, the more I realize why this book hit me as hard as it did. I know what it’s like to feel like Jake. I’ve been there, maybe not in the extreme way that he is, but I’ve been at a point where things just feel hopeless. I know what it’s like to have regrets keep me up at night, to feel like I’ll be alone forever, and to want it all to just be over.

It’s taken me a long time, and while I still need more help and recovery, I’ve come to accepted things for the way they are. I know that if I dwell on the past then that will cause me nothing but trouble. Acceptance is hard, for the longest time I couldn’t accept anything, but now that I have, I’ve started to get better at handling what life hits me with. It doesn’t take the pain away, but it helps not let it not feel like the end of the world.

From one  perspective it could be that it wasn’t Jake’s regrets that brought about his end, but his fixation on them. Instead of trying to move on and march forward, he became compulsively obsessed with his own failures. Maybe if he just accepted that things are the way they are and no amount of regret will change that, he might have been able to move on with his life.

Then again though, maybe he did accept it and that’s why he committed suicide. It could very well be that his acceptance of his failures and the fact that he knows just how much he’s missed out on in life is what made him decide to end things. Sometimes acceptance can be a two edged sword that both heals us and cuts into our skin, and the depth of the cut depends on if we’re a glass half empty or half full type of person. It depends on whether we think the future can be salvaged or if there’s no hope of saving ourselves.

Or maybe it’s something totally different. I don’t know, and I’m okay with that. Thinking about the questions and the implications is cathartic to me. In diving into the heart of the book, I’m doing the same thing with myself. By asking what makes it tick, I’m asking what makes myself tick. As weird as it sounds, by pursuing non-existent answers it’s like I’m gazing into my own soul. Any definitive answers would take away the magic of everything. It would strip away the feeling of exploration that’s at the heart of it.

I’m glad there are no answers in I’m Thinking of Ending Thing’s for the same reason I’m glad there are none in life itself. It’s because for both of them, it’s not the destination that matters.

It’s the journey that counts.