I’m enough of a dork to be a frequent visitor on Reddit. One of the sub-Reddits that I like to visit is called “horrorlit.” In this space, horror fans will ask for and receive book recommendations. I recently came across a post where the OP was requesting books with an unreliable narrator. I thought this was interesting. So, I took a look myself, and grabbed some of the titles to read. I ran through two such books fairly quickly. Because I read them back-to-back, I am reviewing them together, in this double book review post. Enjoy!
Book Review #1
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
I will start by reviewing Iain Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things. It’s worth noting that there is a Netflix series made from this book. I’ve not seen the series. So, I won’t make any comparisons there. The plot of the book is simple, on the surface. It’s a journey/travel novel. A lot of the action takes place in a car, or at places that are unknown to the protagonist.
Once you reach the end, it’s hard to say whether the narrator is unreliable or not. Are they really that unreliable? Or are they simply playing out a fantasy? Do they believe the fantasy? Or do they understand everything that happened? You have to decide. The ending is not ambiguous, but the reliability or unreliability of the narrator, in my opinion, is up for debate.
The prose is incredibly precise, and the book is a work of art unto itself. Yes, I picked it out of a horror literature forum, and that’s probably where it’s shelved in a bookstore. However, based off of the character-driven plot and the beauty of the prose, this book is very likely considered literary.
If you are reading this book as a writer, and you are looking precisely at how to write unreliable narrators, this is a great book to read.
Book Review #2
A Head Full of Ghosts
So the next review, Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, is a very different tale from the first. This one is the story of a crumbling family. There is a mentally ill sister, a suddenly religious father, a stressed mother, and a little sister who is witness. In addition to this, there is a camera crew who is there to record the family’s undoing.
This story is one that wants you to ask questions from the start. It invites you to try and figure out what’s going on. The argument for the unreliability of the narrator is made because she’s young.
But the narrator presents herself as reliable, and the readers never find any reason not to trust her. Even at the end, where the audience learns that things happened differently than everyone would have believed in the world of the book, she still doesn’t appear, to me, at least; to be an untrustworthy narrator.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, if you are looking to write something with an unreliable narrator. It is important to present evidence for the readers that shows the differences between the world the character sees, and the way things actually are.
In, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, the title itself has two meanings. By the end of the book, the tragedy of the whole thing crashes down on the reader. How much do I misunderstand? How much of a life can pass a person by? In A Head Full of Ghosts, much of the misunderstandings can be explained either by the youngness of the narrator, or by the fact that she wouldn’t have been told certain things, etc.
Both books are excellent examples of their genre. Both are stories worth reading, but only one has a truly unreliable narrator, even though they are both first person, which does mean that the narrators will be unreliable–to a degree.
Thank you for reading! Let me know if you enjoyed this double book review and if you would like to see more of this, or if you’d like to see something different. Thank you!
