I'm Thinking Of Ending Things by Iain Reid

Note that I deviated from my usual review title format for this one, so as not to alarm my many loyal fans

You could sum up Iain Reed’s I’m Thinking Of Ending Things in two sentences: a woman goes to visit her boyfriend’s parents. Things start out kind of weird, and then they gradually get extremely weird. But detailed plot synopses lasting at least two paragraphs is how we roll here in the content venue, so let’s dig into this some more.

Our unnamed protagonist is on her way to the rural home of her new boyfriend’s parents. She and Jake haven’t been dating for very long, and she agreed to the trip even though she’s titularly thinking of breaking up with him. She’s also been under a lot of stress lately due to a creepy man who keeps calling her from her own number, who may or may not be connected to the creepy man she saw outside her window as a child. And the drive is a little unnerving, what with the sudden lapses in her memory and the fact that the same song keeps playing on the radio, and the weird little details like the burned-down house with a brand new swing set in the front garden.

At this point I could probably stop the review--if you’re one of the people this sort of shit appeals to then you know you’re in good hands here and you’ve probably already gone off to buy it--but let’s go on a little further. Once they get to Jake’s house things get even stranger; in fact, between his parents' disturbing behaviour and their house being like a smaller version of the mansion from Resident Evil 7, our main character starts to wish she had ended things earlier. But the night is far from over, and what waits ahead is far more strange and disturbing than anything that’s happened to her so far, a collapse of reality and personhood that culminates in a final, shocking twist.

Well, other people said it’s a twist. I saw it coming so far in advance that I didn’t even register it was meant to be one, because I’m very intelligent and good-looking.

Categorizing I’m Thinking Of Ending Things is a little tricky. There is a very strong element of horror throughout the novel, which is why I included it in our October celebrations, but it’s a particular brand of horror: the eerie and the uncanny rather than the truly frightening, a formless sense of dread that creeps at the edges of your vision. The closest analogue I can think of is the scarier parts of David Lynch’s oeuvre (there’s a bit near the end of the book that I’m pretty sure is a direct riff on the cowboy scene from Mulholland Drive). I spent much of the book feeling extremely spooked but unable to pinpoint exactly why, and if you’ve heard me gush about Silent Hill before then you’ll know that’s exactly the way I like my horror.

There’s a terrific sense of place in the book, with the few locations featured--the car, Jake’s parents’ house, a dairy queen and one more that I won’t describe to avoid spoilers--all positively dripping with quiet menace despite not actually being described in very much detail. When the protagonist descends into a creepy basement at one point it’s like you’re entering a Francis Bacon painting, one of the really weird ones with the screaming popes. This is high-octane creepiness of a sort that’s pretty much non-existent in the work of actual horror authors, which strengthens my long-held conviction that the best horror can be found in media that isn’t explicitly categorized as such.

In terms of the actual plot...well, there isn’t one. Not that nothing happens, but that this is firmly a metaphorical novel and trying to read it as a sequence of literal events isn’t going to yield anything productive, as attested to by the many confused one-star reviews on Amazon. But of course, being metaphorical isn’t an excuse for forgoing an interesting story or just slapping down whatever nonsense comes into your head, and for the most part I’m Thinking Of Ending Things avoids both of those pitfalls.

There might not be a traditional narrative at play, but there is a propulsive existential mystery, driven by a prose style that’s rendered as the relentless, frantic thought process of its protagonist. At the same time, this is a capital-L Literary novel and you have to put up with some of the usual bad habits of modern Literary novels: it feels overly wordy despite being very short, the characters often talk like robots mimicking human speech, and there are occasional sections like this:

This antiseptic Dairy Queen with fridges and freezers and fluorescent lighting and metal appliances and red spoons, straws wrapped in plastic, and cup dispensers and the quiet but constant buzz overhead.

Rattling off lists of mundane stuff is how literary authors establish that their book is about Our Zany Modern World; you’re supposed to read this and be like “Gosh, plastic spoons, that sure is a thing!” and then feel that the author was very clever for making you think that.

These pitfalls bog the book down, but they’re not substantial enough to overshadow the thick atmosphere or interesting themes. What I was iffier on was the book’s ending, a delirious sequence where the story melts into outright psychological surreality and the truth about what’s actually been going on is (sort of) revealed. I appreciate that ambiguous endings are supposed to be confusing to an extent, but ultimately you want a metaphorical work like this to present you with some sort of coherent thematic statement, and I’m Thinking Of Ending Things ends up not really settling on any of the multiple strands of meaning that it casts for the reader. There’s meaning to be extracted, but to me the ending felt somewhat disconnected from the rest of the story up until that point.

Still, I came away impressed with the book overall and I’d highly recommend anyone looking for surreal or literary horror check it out. My only real disappointment is that some of the eerie imagery in the book seems tailor-made for the screen. If only someone would turn it into a movie…

Someone Turned It Into a Movie

Charlie Kaufmann to be precise, of Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind fame (I’m bringing up that movie because it’s the only one of his I’ve seen). This is his third time as a director after Synecdoche, New York and Anomalisa, and he also wrote the screenplay.

The movie follows the outline of the book pretty closely: the protagonist, now named Lucy (at least at first), travels with her boyfriend Jake to his parent’s house in rural Minnesota. Weird things happen. Some of them are just as weird as the things that happen in the book while others are significantly weirder, not always in a good way.

The most important thing for I’m Thinking Of Ending Things-heads to realize is that this adaptation represents an almost complete genre shift. The book’s horror isn’t entirely absent, but it’s severely downplayed in favour of a thick layer of Wes Anderson-esque quirky stylisation, coupled with much more direct journey-into-the-mind imagery reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine. 

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing--the movie looks gorgeous and some of the surreal imagery is as close to Magritte: The Movie as I’ve ever seen--but as a fan of the novel’s scarier elements I couldn’t help but be disappointed. And unfortunately, that’s not the only way in which the movie stumbles in the process of adaptation.

The book, for as odd as it is, stays in pretty conventional narrative territory until the very end; the story is rooted firmly in the narrator’s viewpoint and the plot appears to be occurring in objective reality. The movie abandons objectivity very early on--potentially in the opening scene, depending on your perspective--and starts splitting the point of view between Lucy and Jake at Jake’s parents’ house, less than halfway through. This leaves the viewer with nothing solid to hold on to. Sometimes Lucy is the confused audience surrogate reacting to the fact that Jake and his parents and the other people they meet are acting in strange, inexplicable ways, while at other times Lucy herself is the one doing the odd things and Jake is supposed to be our anchoring perspective.

Coupled with a willingness to dive head-first into outright surreality much earlier on, this makes the entire experience feel overly confusing and exhausting. The bones of the original narrative with its relatively sober point-A-to-point-B plot are visible within, but they don’t mesh with the looser, stranger meat of what Kaufmann added. The impression I get is that he started out with a pretty straightforward recounting of the novel, then kept embellishing and tinkering until it had drifted quite far from the source material but kept the original beats of the plot.

That said, the adaptational changes aren’t all bad. Most of the Literary waffling has been replaced with dialogue that feels like actual human speech, and overall there’s a lot more chemistry and humanity to Lucy and Jake’s interactions. Which is welcome, although at the same time the movie adds in several additional, long talking-in-the-car scenes (the book really only had one extended sequence of this, in between the start and the arrival at Jake’s parents’ house, after which the story moves forward at a fairly brisk pace) which make the movie’s two-plus hour runtime drag uncomfortably in places.

One new element I appreciated is an aspect of temporal strangeness, with Lucy appearing to see Jake’s parents at different states in their lives. This isn’t present in the book, but it’s a natural extension of the book’s story once you realize what it’s actually about. Whatever else I have to say about the movie, Kaufmann clearly understood the book very well; this isn’t a case of a director not “getting” the source material and wandering off track as a result, but instead making a very deliberate creative decision to deviate from the source material for artistic reasons.

I was very curious to see how the movie would handle the novel’s ending, since as presented on the page it would be more or less impossible to adapt directly to film. The movie’s ending is equally strange, but for all the wrong reasons, Kaufmann descending into a wildly self-indulgent sequence involving interpretive dance and cartoons. It all drags on for far too long, feels surreal for the sake of being surreal and brings the story to a close in a far less clear and succinct manner than the book.

I still recommend checking the movie out if you like the book, and maybe even if you don’t. If you’re a fan of surreal, abstract imagery, then you’re guaranteed to have a good time even if it might seem like a bit of a slog in places.