don't fear the daystar

First off, I want to say this is a FANTASTIC horror story. Best I have ever read, honestly. I read the audiobook version and the voice acting is beyond amazing! What's a stronger word than fantastic? Brilliant! Amazing! Superb!

That said... and I'll try to avoid specific spoilers if I can, but I will be talking somewhat vaguely about the gist of the story, and I will be talking about the ending.

About the ending:

I absolutely HATE the ending. DETEST it. I know it's horror, but I was hoping for a happy ending, or at least some kind of near miss or whatever, but like... the implications at the end are EXTREMELY grim.

However, the ending is also open to interpretation.

I mean yes, there *is* evidence that it was all real, and that the ending is exactly what it says it is, and that the implications are real. However... the whole story is told entirely first-person by someone who was not in a good headspace for most of her life to begin with, someone who might have been a reliable narrator at the start, but as soon as things start "going down," she becomes increasingly less reliable as the story progresses.

A surface read of the story says it was all real, the stakes were real, the implications at the end are real and just as grim as suggested. But given we have only the point of view of an unreliable narrator to work with, other possibilities emerge:

1. That David's mental illness somehow jumped over to her as a result of doing The Rites. It has precedent in the real world. Thus the story, in this interpretation, is just the narrator's spiral into madness.

2. That the demon The Rites are meant to keep at bay is real, but it's a liar and the stakes are fake, meaning all it's really capable of doing is giving one person at a time horrible visions and messing with their mind to convince them their delusions are real to torture them into committing suicide, and manipulating reality just enough to make some of the delusions visible to other people as a means of bolstering the claims it's making to its torture victim.

And since I loathe and despise the ending of this amazing and riveting book so much, I choose to believe that second alternate interpretation: the implications mean nothing, because the demon is just continuing to torture poor Macy.

Honestly, that interpretation seems most right to me anyway, because the kind of cruelty the demon employed would be difficult to really pull off in the kind of world it threatened its victims with. I feel like it would get bored if it could really pull off that threat.

You know, or she simply went insane. Bad wiring in the house, bad latches on the doors, and an already fragile mind taking some other poor mentally ill person's delusions too seriously and caught the same delusions.

Either way, if you want to know what it's like having obsessive-compulsive disorder, how debilitating that neurological condition is (and it IS neurological; it's caused by bad wiring in the brain causing someone's panic system to be on basically all the time, with their rituals/rites being the only thing that gives them even the slightest relief to that panic), then this is the book to read. And I highly recommend the audiobook version, even if you normally read a text version, it is simply THAT good. But if talk of depression or suicide is too heavy for you, maybe skip this one. It's a very large part of the story.