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icanreadish 's review for:
Incidents Around the House
by Josh Malerman
slow-paced
an interesting experiment with horror. at first, i liked the formatting, but after a few chapters and a lot of paragraph infodump monologues from dad, it grew tiresome to keep up with. there were some chilling scenes - kyle and the phone, other mommy showing up at the party - but all thrills were dragged by a grueling pace, repetitive plot elements and infuriating mother/father character decisions that made no sense [getting trashed when your daughter is haunted by a ghost??? okay. and yes characters can make bad decisions but SERIOUSLY this made no sense for the father character. mom, yes. in fact - the mom should've been worse considering the character of other mommy]
- but exactly, that. i think the book would've been tighter if the 'pest' wasn't a 'mom' but another child. at first i thought malerman was going with an abusive parent / dysfunctional family as the ghost story in kubrick-esque fashion, but that wasn't the case at all, so i'm just very stumped by the symbol of 'other mommy' as a 7 foot tall, dark-haired and incredibly hairy monster with a huge terror-jawdrop potential. [what seemingly normal child would make friends with that???????]
also with the title and cover, there should actually be incidents around the house. + this could've been at least 100 pages shorter if we didn't have the same cycle of horror + plot elements repeating and repeating and repeating and repeating ( how many times do they move? how many times does someone kick them out? how many times does the girl think about how other mommy is both a friend and a villain? how many times do we get dad philosophizing at his 5 year old? how many times does grandma have to try and set them straight? )
once it's revealed that other mommy can take on different voices WHY didn't we get at least ONE SCENE from an iconic nosleep moment like, you hear your mom's voices upstairs & downstairs at the same time and you have to figure out which is real and which is the monster
WHY DIDN'T OTHER MOMMY DO ANYTHING 'MOMMY' LIKE ???? THERE WAS NOTHING MOMMY ABOUT HER WHY IS SHE MOMMY WHAT IS THIS i'm so frustrated with the huge lack of potential here
on the plusses: again, some strong scenes. the child pov was fun.
- but exactly, that. i think the book would've been tighter if the 'pest' wasn't a 'mom' but another child. at first i thought malerman was going with an abusive parent / dysfunctional family as the ghost story in kubrick-esque fashion, but that wasn't the case at all, so i'm just very stumped by the symbol of 'other mommy' as a 7 foot tall, dark-haired and incredibly hairy monster with a huge terror-jawdrop potential. [what seemingly normal child would make friends with that???????]
also with the title and cover, there should actually be incidents around the house. + this could've been at least 100 pages shorter if we didn't have the same cycle of horror + plot elements repeating and repeating and repeating and repeating ( how many times do they move? how many times does someone kick them out? how many times does the girl think about how other mommy is both a friend and a villain? how many times do we get dad philosophizing at his 5 year old? how many times does grandma have to try and set them straight? )
WHY DIDN'T OTHER MOMMY DO ANYTHING 'MOMMY' LIKE ???? THERE WAS NOTHING MOMMY ABOUT HER WHY IS SHE MOMMY WHAT IS THIS i'm so frustrated with the huge lack of potential here
on the plusses: again, some strong scenes. the child pov was fun.