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A review by lurieta
Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5
Thank you Netgalley for this ARC! This deeply creepy tale is my introduction to Josh Malerman's work, but it won't be the last book I read by this author. In it, eight-year-old Bela senses that all is not right between her Mommy and Daddo. To make matters worse, she is visited at night by an entity called "Other Mommy" who emerges from the dark of her closet. Other Mommy says they are friends, that she is there to help Bela, but each night, she asks Bela, "can I go into your heart?" As Bela's uneasiness with this question grows, Other Mommy escalates her otherworldly hauntings, bleeding into Bela's daytime world and threatening to tear her life and her fragile family apart.
As a lover of horror, it takes a lot to scare me in such a variety of ways, but this book did that effectively. Other Mommy's ability to imitate others and make Bela and her parents question their safety and sense of reality at every turn was both surreal and cinematic; I could easily imagine this as an A24 film. There were times in which Bela's personhood became obscured by the marital troubles between her parents, especially her mother, and because of the way the text is formatted, it was not always attributable to a particular character, However, there was something interesting about having so much of the book take place in Bela's interior world, which is under threat, and everything external, like her parent's frequent monologues, are encroaching until it is hard to tell what is real for Bela.
Be warned, this is a very unsettling book that won't leave you feeling good, but it will have you checking all the dark corners of your home in case something is lurking where you can't see.
As a lover of horror, it takes a lot to scare me in such a variety of ways, but this book did that effectively. Other Mommy's ability to imitate others and make Bela and her parents question their safety and sense of reality at every turn was both surreal and cinematic; I could easily imagine this as an A24 film. There were times in which Bela's personhood became obscured by the marital troubles between her parents, especially her mother, and because of the way the text is formatted, it was not always attributable to a particular character, However, there was something interesting about having so much of the book take place in Bela's interior world, which is under threat, and everything external, like her parent's frequent monologues, are encroaching until it is hard to tell what is real for Bela.
Be warned, this is a very unsettling book that won't leave you feeling good, but it will have you checking all the dark corners of your home in case something is lurking where you can't see.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Alcoholism and Violence