I read 'The Summer That Melted Everything' a couple years back and still find myself chewing on that ending sometimes. The whole novel builds this oppressive, almost mythical heat in Breathed, Ohio, and the arrival of this boy claiming to be the devil. It sets up a kind of moral fable, so you're braced for a big allegorical twist.
But the surprise for me wasn't a shocking plot turn so much as the quiet, devastating emotional realism it lands on. After all the fever-dream hysteria and tragedy, it closes on this note of profound, enduring grief and the way memory haunts a place. The final pages shift to a perspective I hadn't fully considered, reframing the entire summer as a personal elegy rather than just a town's catastrophe. The surprise is how intimate and sad it becomes, more than how strange or supernatural.