I'm Thinking of Ending Things

Reid begins with an unassuming premise—a young woman, her boyfriend Jake, and the drive to meet his parents—but he treats that premise less as plot than as a trap being assembled in plain sight. The novel’s earliest pages are calm to the point of strain, and that strain is the point: the woman’s narration keeps returning to thought, to memory, to the private weather of doubt, until the road itself feels less like a route than a corridor. Reid is excellent on the small distortions that make a relationship uncanny; a pause in conversation, a wrong turn in tone, the sense that one person is speaking from behind glass. The book’s menace accumulates through grammar and rhythm as much as through incident.

What gives the novel its peculiar force is the way it keeps reformatting itself as you read. It is at once a psychological horror story, an argument about identity, and a meditation on how the mind edits reality to preserve a livable version of the self. Reid is especially good on the house, the parents, the school, the banal institutional spaces where private panic takes on architectural shape. The prose is stripped and plain, but not merely spare; it is tuned to create an almost metallic resonance, as if each sentence were struck against the next. That restraint serves the book well, because it refuses the cheap release of overexplanation.

I also appreciated the novel’s willingness to live inside philosophical unease rather than resolve it. Reid keeps circling questions of loneliness, performance, and the stories we tell ourselves about being known; the result is a book that feels less like a puzzle box than a pressure chamber. The recurring motif of endings—relationships ending, lives ending, interpretations ending—gives the novel an unnerving unity. Even the most ordinary details seem to lean toward erasure. And yet the book is not only bleak; there is a strange tenderness in the way it recognizes the need to imagine continuity, however fragile, when the self is beginning to fray.

My reservation is that Reid’s method, for all its precision, can become a little mannered in its insistence on withholding. The novel’s repetitions are purposeful, but they are also so heavily foregrounded that the trick sometimes announces itself before the emotion has fully landed; one can feel the mechanism turning. That is a real limitation in a book so dependent on ambiguity, because tension curdles into academic design when the reader is asked too often to admire the structure rather than inhabit the terror. I wanted, in a few passages, more human abrasion and less conceptual control—more mess at the center of the dread. Still, the book’s restraint is often its strength, and its flaws are the flaws of ambition rather than laziness.

Taken as a whole, the novel is a successful piece of literary horror: compressed, intelligent, and disquietingly intimate. It does not merely aim to unsettle; it aims to destabilize the terms by which we understand intimacy, memory, and even narrative itself. That aim is what makes it more interesting than a conventional thriller, and more durable than one, too. I would not call it perfect; I would call it exacting, chilly, and memorable—the sort of debut that knows how to make a room feel slightly wrong, then refuses to leave until you notice.