I’m Thinking of Ending Things…

I read Ian Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things on a school night a few years ago. It was supposed to be some light reading before bed, but I was up until two in the morning finishing it. Reid’s writing is deep, dark, and terrifying. He can link stagnant, inconsequential ideas to ultimately form prose that causes readers to feel completely out of control.

The first few sentences of his novel are instantly intriguing.

“I’m thinking of ending things. Once this thought arrives, it stays. It sticks. It lingers.”

The book begins with the narrator’s candid perspective, a young woman who remains nameless, as she contemplates her short-lived relationship with her boyfriend, Jake, who is driving them to his parent’s house for dinner. As the narrator’s stream of consciousness about her relationship develops, readers are interrupted with short chapters that elusively address a freak accident involving an old high school janitor.

When the narrator arrives at Jake’s eerie family farmhouse, the night’s events begin to creepily unfold. For instance, when she sneaks around the home unsupervised, she inexplicably recognizes herself in a few of their displayed family photographs. Then, after a creepy family dinner, the young couple drives back home, stopping for frozen lemonade at Dairy Queen on the way. The tension in the car has visibly shifted after an uneasy family dinner as the narrator continues to ponder their relationship. Moreover, throughout the night, there are scattered instances of foreshadowing about our narrator’s well-being. When they stop for their drinks, a young Dairy Queen employee hands our narrator her cup and proceeds to creepily murmur that she’s “frightened” for her.

As their ride back home continues, Jake decides to (rather insistently) pull over at a local high school to throw away their empty cups. After a brief argument in the school parking lot, the couple begins to make out inside the car. Jake then claims that a school janitor was spying on them through the car window. In a supposed act of heroism, Jake chases after the janitor straight into the high school. Now, the poor narrator is alone in a deserted parking lot on a cold winter night, a spine-chilling set-up.

When Jake fails to return, the narrator decides to search for him. Once inside the high school, the narrator’s mental sanity comes into question as she is trapped in a wild goose chase. She is frantically running from the janitor, who she believes to have killed Jake, and is now after her. Then, when we least expect it, our young female narrator morphs right before our eyes as readers suddenly grasp the gravity of the situation. There is only a single character behind this entire story. There was no “girlfriend” or “boyfriend”, or anyone else for that matter; the high school janitor is the alleged mastermind behind this relationship’s demise. 

So, what exactly happens? I’ve read this novel twice and it’s still hard to explain. The story’s diction shifts as readers realize that the young female narrator does not exist. It was all a ruse, a cover story, that ultimately led to the janitor’s suicide. When the “girlfriend” and the janitor finally coincide at the end of the novel, Ian Reid hints that it was “Jake” all along. The “girlfriend”, ‘Jake’, and the janitor, now all one and the same, continue this fabricated narrative as these manifestations simultaneously die by suicide. Jake, the high school janitor, was the originator of this fallacious tale as the novel captures both the ensuing anecdote and the aftermath of his death.

After the first read, I naively believed that the narrator’s boyfriend, Jake, had sneakily narrated this stunt to drag her inside the school and kill her. A few Google searches helped point me in the right direction, but I like to think this version could stand as well.

I picked up this book again a few days ago and I can safely say that Ian Reid’s “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is a story you can only experience once. When one already knows the fate of the “characters”, the novel’s initial allure decreases exponentially. The story doesn’t stand on its own, it needs the unhinged ending that is best enjoyed by a new set of eyes. The “it was one guy all along” twist gets old after the first read.

However, even the second time around, Reid’s story continues to conjure an insatiable desire in its readers as he masterfully describes scenes like Jake’s family farmhouse and the deserted high school to cohesively paint a spine-tingling backdrop that readers can enjoy more than once. The novel promises fear and unease in its readers, and it delivers every single time. Now, if only I could go back and read it all for the very first time again.