by Iain Reid
A Book review plus Book vs Movie Comparison
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a horror, psychological, suspense fiction and a quick read. It follows a young new couple as they take a long drive to meet the boyfriend’s parents. The leading lady is nameless throughout the book. It’s all told through her perspective. She’s thinking about ending the relationship, but goes on this trip to see if she really should or not. She knows it’s not right to keep leading him on, however. The boyfriend, Jake, is really smart, works in a lab, and is described as tall, thin, and wears glasses.
Due to the nature of the book and how it’s told from the young woman’s inner dialogue, the prose is short and condensed like quick thoughts. There were a lot of repeating words during stressful times. For example: “It’s so dark. Dark.” It really gives you a feel for the tension and unease the character is feeling even with her inner monologues. There is this one point towards the end that has a whole page or two of just the same line over and over again. I can’t imagine having to listen to that in audiobook. It was easy enough to skim/skip that part reading the ebook. It is a pivotal moment.
So, keeping this part somewhat short; they take this drive and talk about all sorts of things. The main young woman, always nameless, describes a mystery Caller and some events from her past to the reader and sometimes to Jake. She tells him a story of a driving lesson and struggles with deciding if she should tell him about the Caller. Then, they get to his parents house and instead of going inside immediately, Jake wants to show her around the farm. Weird things are seen and mentioned that don’t really make a lot of sense. Inside the house, Jake is suddenly extremely quiet and almost nonexistent. The young woman has an awkward dinner with him and his parents where she notices things aren’t quite right. She explores the basement and Jake’s room afterwards. More car ride after they leave. They stop at Dairy Queen where a teenage girl says she’s worried for our main character. Very weird. They head to a school to dump the melting cups of lemonade. “So they don’t get the cupholders sticky.” It’s lemonade…not ice cream. Where is it going to go?? Anyways, after they get to the school is when the really weird stuff begins and I am just going to leave it there. I don’t want to spoil it. It’s so important to everything that’s happened so far.
I didn’t hate the book, but it wasn’t my kind of thing. It was definitely eerie. Could have been a good movie. If Charlie Kaufman hadn’t messed it up by adding artsy fartsy things just to make it artsy. Completely unnecessary and takes away the entire point and message of the book. The book was okay, I started giving it a 3 and changed it to 2. Eh.
The movie, however, is definitely a big fat ZERO rating. Everything was changed. The young woman kept having different names. The clothes kept changing. The conversations were not even similar topics. The whole dinner scene was extremely wrong. Done well, but wrong. No basement scene. Too many janitor scenes early on where in the book it was mysterious police conversations which I imagine could be done easily enough on the silver screen. Jake looks the exact opposite of how he is in the book which seems significant to me, as did their personalities that seemed flipped. It felt much more important and done well than the movie did. The entire school ending was wrong. It was weird, musical, animated all sort of wrong. There is a point where artistic form goes from being artistic to just stupidity. This movie went past that with the ending. The entire message was messed up and wasn’t resolved. Also…I appreciate not having to see a naked old man’s butt.
End rant. Sorry about that. In other words, book was definitely better than the movie, however the book wasn’t anything special either.
Rachels Books 