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A review by miffybooks
I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
4.0
"Something that disorients, that unsettles what's taken for granted, something that disturbs and disrupts reality - that's scary."
yeah... pretty stunningly scary. i love how iain reid builds horror through the concept of the generic. how he makes settings and characters that you can already picture because you feel like you've seen them thousands of times before and then throws in a discordant image that really punctuates discomfort. the paintings in the basement, the mother's face when she tells the girlfriend to answer her phone, the sterility of the dairy queen eight minutes before closing. its a book that gets under your skin in a way that i hadnt felt while reading before.
im not quite sure what it MEANS yet but i am sure that im feeling what its meant to evoke. and in a book like this, i think feeling is even more important than understanding. it reminds me a lot of mulholland drive: the way horror is built through the mundane, the themes of convergence, the assuredness of the surrealism. i want to read this again sometime, maybe starting with the ending first, but i think itll be a bit before im ready to pick it up again lol.
yeah... pretty stunningly scary. i love how iain reid builds horror through the concept of the generic. how he makes settings and characters that you can already picture because you feel like you've seen them thousands of times before and then throws in a discordant image that really punctuates discomfort. the paintings in the basement, the mother's face when she tells the girlfriend to answer her phone, the sterility of the dairy queen eight minutes before closing. its a book that gets under your skin in a way that i hadnt felt while reading before.
im not quite sure what it MEANS yet but i am sure that im feeling what its meant to evoke. and in a book like this, i think feeling is even more important than understanding. it reminds me a lot of mulholland drive: the way horror is built through the mundane, the themes of convergence, the assuredness of the surrealism. i want to read this again sometime, maybe starting with the ending first, but i think itll be a bit before im ready to pick it up again lol.