I thought the prose level of this story was excellent. The author has a good ear for dialog, for narrative voice and a nice touch with descriptions. Tonewise, it was delightful.
However, the story itself was full of plot holes and characters acting unbelievably, several of which have already been pointed out :
I have a hard time that a mother would kill her fetus for a house. She was acting strange, but it was secretive-strange, not crazy-strange.
On top of that, which I also had a hard time with, I was bothered by not knowing how exactly this woman was getting the ladder to the attic, opening it up and getting the corpses up there, especially in the wake of a "miscarriage". If I was supposed to think the real estate agent was placing the bodies, I didn't find the details that would make me think that.
I think the problem with the dead animals wasn't that they weren't saved for the end, but rather that they were so casually found in the attic. There wasn't anything particular about the attic,
I agree completely. There was no reason not to make the placement of the animals carry symbolic meaning for the characters in the story. If all the real estate agent cared about was the entrails (is he eating them?) then the body placement shouldn't matter (and she should have buried them in the garden as has been suggested elsewhere in the thread), but if there was a ritual she was completing, then the attic must be made to be significant as part of a ritual, and there must be some sign other than the bodies themselves that their location in the heaven of the house is significant (like maybe the altar Thaurismunths suggested).
It did affect me on this level somewhat, but not enough, and the ending was too abrupt....The problem is the final reveal is essentially reveals two and three, so much of the impact is lost, and the POV character's somewhat flat reaction doesn't help things along.
Yes, yes! The reveal being reveals two and three. I never would have put it that way, but it's exactly right. You can hardly be bothered to care about the "locked in the basement" part because he doesn't let you breathe between "omg she sacrificed her own fetus" and "now she lives in the basement". Ending is too rushed.
The worst misstep, though, for me, was the tossed-in Roger POV scene. WTF was that? First of all, Roger was way more interesting than the primary narrator, so you teased me with a character I was really interested in then left that whole thread dangling. Second of all, the only thing that scene tells me is that the wife actually does screw around (and loves it) so why is she so scrupulous about not fucking the real estate guy? It can't be because real estate guy is so terrible since, after all, the best friend seems to like him well enough to "want to move every week". So what gives? Why is she preferring to sacrifice her own progeny before sleeping with a guy? I realize we're not in her POV, so maybe we can't have the exact answers, but her actions still have to make some modicum of sense. And they completely don't. She's like a black box plot agitator and not a person. In fact, I felt that scene was thrown in to red herring me into sympathizing with the narrator and thinking the woman truly was being unfaithful, to which I cry, "Foul, Author".
Also yes, pauses between scenes way too long, though otherwise I liked the reading.