Book Review: Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman
Genre: Horror/Drama
Age: Adults
Format: eBook
I borrowed the eBook on Libby app from my local library. In hindsight, this was the perfect book to kick me out of a terrible reading slump I’ve been in for almost 2 months.
At the outset, “Incidents Around the House” can be seen as a haunted house story with a dash of possession horror. That is, until you realize it may not be the house that’s haunted. The protagonist is eight-year-old Bela, whose first-person PoV was a pleasantly interesting vantage to experience this story from. Even more because she’s also the horror’s target—an entity she calls “Other Mommy,” hidden in her bedroom closet, seems to fancy her and keeps asking, “Can I enter your heart?” And it won’t stop until Bela answers. Or rather, until she gives the answer it wants. Caught in the crosshairs are Bela’s parents, Mommy and Daddo, who’re in a dysfunctional marriage and only growing apart.
The book kicks off at a galloping pace, dropping you in the middle of it all than spending time building up to the “incidents” in the title. Like children her age, Bela is curious and innocent, and she thinks the world of her Mommy and Daddo. Though we, as the reader, get to see the warts in their relationship, they’re still shown through Bela’s eyes, which give the cliché-to-be a fun spin. On that note, I love it when horror explores the extraordinary in the ordinary, themes that resonate with almost all of us and stuff we fear could happen to us. In this book, it shows up in the form of Bela’s gradual but inevitable emotional growth out of childhood, as the narrative unravels for her the closets in her parents’ lives. In that sense, Other Mommy takes on the persona of a catalyst to bring family secrets to light - secrets Bela deserves to know. Perhaps the greater horror exposed here is the fear of growing up.
However, this book isn’t without its faults. There comes a point in the story where the scenes start to spin in circles. To an extent, I could tell that’s the point: the family is desperate to rid their home of Other Mommy, yet the thing keeps coming back stronger than before. While that’s a cool kernel for horror, the execution was as dull as it could’ve been – rehashed conversations, moral monologues from the parents that didn’t really dig deep, and a pattern of scene progressions that made the outcomes predictable. The book could’ve tightened those up.
This story is really good at building dread. It’s evident in the way Bela describes Other Mommy and how the entity reveals itself in the later scenes. What felt weaker by contrast was the feeling of terror, which is the release of that feeling of dread. I wish the payoff was just as good as the build-up. All said, this was still a fun read and I recommend it for those who enjoy stories that play into the dread of possession paired with dysfunctional family dynamics.
Review by Aditya Sundararajan
Twitter & Bluesky: @AdityaSWrites
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