Have you read The Bird Box? That one haunted me for a long time. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18498558-bird-box

Thanks for this, it’s about the only place I’ve been able to find what the original ending was. It sounds like it’s the same as the western version in spirit, but the details are different.

There’s no author apology though.

I have the same problem, Naz, though mine is just with books. TV/film scare me just fine, but I can’t seem to get sincerely creeped out in the same way by literature. One book of short stories, Probably Monsters by Ray Cluley, is the only one that’s genuinely gotten to me. There were also points when I was listening to IT by Stephen King in an empty apartment and, like Jenny, had to roam around looking for any stray murderous clowns. That’s bout it, though.

In any case, let me know if you find anything good!

This one sounds really interesting. What happened to Katherine was brutal, but I’m kind of glad this is a story about a woman who haunts a town. Hauntings are my favorite and they’re better when the haunting goes beyond 1 house!

Re: the setting change stuff, knowing he Americanized it bumps it even further back on my list of Books I May Someday Read. I get where he’s coming from, but I’d much rather read a scary Dutch book from a Dutch person than a scary Americanized book from a non-American of any nationality. I get too frickin’ much of that as a matter of course.

Okay. So. The ending! MASSIVE SPOILERS ALL AROUND of course.
This is slightly complicated, since apparently he’s changed the names, as well?

The ending is kind of long, I’d say it starts when the youngest son is admitted. But skipping to the end of the ending: it turns into into an orgy of torture like an Hieronymus Bosch painting of Hell. This is, of course, imagery we are all more or less familiar with over here, since the guy was Dutch and we all learned about him in
school. Nice echo of the ‘just a village like all those you know so well’-horror trope.

The dad is led through all these horrors and recognizes each of them as a mirror image of things the villagers did
to the witch (I thought this was a bit far fetched at times, your mileage may vary). In the end, he realises that he must choose the thing he loves most. He runs between dozens of pot holes filled with people while it rains burning coals, carrying a single pot hole cover, finds wife + youngest son but jumps in the seemingly empty hole next to them, because we’ve know which son he would choose since chapter two or so.

He then wakes up in his own house to someone thumping the front door, and doesn’t open it, because he knows that even if it is the person he wants it to be, it wouldn’t end well.

And then the author apologizes for throwing us into a pit of despair.