I'm Thinking of Ending Things

What Readers Say

The reaction to I'm Thinking of Ending Things splits neatly into two camps, and both camps are telling you something true. Readers who love it reach for the same words every time: fever dream, unsettling, compulsive. One commenter in r/suggestmeabook called it "a trip" — not a review exactly, but accurate. Multiple people in the same thread showed up just to confirm someone had already named it. That's the book's signature: you finish it and immediately want to know if other people felt the same thing you did.

The plot-twist crowd recommends it constantly, though u/IWantMyGarmonbozia put it better than most: "fuck yeah. love seeing these get a mention. both are phenomenal books" — referring to this and Reid's follow-up Foe. But one dissenting voice in that same thread is also worth noting: u/tot-and-beans found the twist underwhelming and the writing thin. That's a real response. I'm Thinking of Ending Things doesn't work for everyone, and the people it doesn't work for usually wanted something more conventionally satisfying.

The readers it does work for tend to come from a specific lineage. One commenter invoked the Twilight Zone unprompted — that mid-century tradition of dread that doesn't explain itself, where the wrongness is the point. Readers in r/WeirdLit group it alongside Anna Kavan's Ice and Brian Evenson's Last Days, which tells you something about the register. This isn't a thriller in the conventional sense. It's closer to psychological horror operating through atmosphere and logical displacement — conversations that almost track, details that shift sentence to sentence, a farmhouse visit that feels like being trapped in someone else's bad dream.

Who It's For

I'd recommend I'm Thinking of Ending Things to readers who are comfortable not knowing what's real, and who can tolerate an ending that doesn't resolve so much as reframe. If you've read House of Leaves and appreciated the disorientation without needing a tidy explanation, Reid is working in adjacent territory — quieter, shorter, but structurally similar in how it weaponizes uncertainty.

It's also genuinely for readers who grew up on Twilight Zone and want that particular flavor of wrongness in prose form. Not gore, not jump scares — just the sustained sensation that something is off and you're not being told what. At 224 pages, the ask is small enough that even skeptics can commit to it.

Skip it if you need your plot twists to pay off cleanly. The ending is divisive because it demands interpretation rather than delivering answers.

Reading Context

Read this one in a single sitting if you can manage it. At 200 pages the whole thing is designed to be consumed in one go — multiple readers say they couldn't put it down once they started, and I believe them. The accumulation of unease depends on sustained immersion. Breaking it into a week of bedtime chapters will drain the tension out of it.

Evening or night reading works best. This isn't a sunny-afternoon book. The farmhouse, the winter drive, the conversations that feel slightly wrong — all of it lands harder when you're already in a low-light, quiet-house headspace. Pair it with Foe, also by Reid, if you want more — several readers consider that the stronger novel, and the two share enough DNA that finishing one creates appetite for the other.