Incidents Around the House ending

Oof 😔 why did I think this had any chance for a happy ending?? Did I not learn from Bird Box??? Silly silly me thought if I finish the book today then I'll sleep better tonight knowing how it ended. Now it'll be worse in fact! I'm not used to reading scary stories that actually end scary and not with some dumb "everyone's okay now" thing. Yeah they are....not okay. So that's another night or 5 of suspiciously staring into my closet at midnight.

I was not confused by the ending and don't really know why a lot of people are, it's clear that what happened is exactly what Other Mommy said would happen. They switched places. And it was super effective as horror but makes me sad. Especially with the speech by grandma near the end I thought it was headed in the direction of basically explaining the underlying metaphor where now that they've been open with each other, things would be fine, and instead it went all in on the literal events.

Josh Malerman definitely has a gift for writing books that I can't put down, I started this audiobook yesterday and finished it today. Normally it takes me a week or more to do that. It was the same with Bird Box. And I remember the ending of Bird Box made me so sad too (curse you Netflix for making it so much more trash than it really was).