Incidents Around the House

The best-laid plans, and all that. I took a lot of time and attention in organizing my current TBR shelf and then along comes Josh Malerman to ruin it. And he’d already disrupted the flow once after I read his novel BIRD BOX (I was so enthralled with that world, I immediately went to the library and checked out the sequel, MALORIE, disrupting the flow of the TBR the first time). Then, after getting back into the flow of my perfectly-organized shelf, he comes along with a podcast interview and shakes things up again!On an episode of THIS IS HORROR, he and the hosts talked about his newest novel, INCIDENTS AROUND THE HOUSE, and the hosts went on and on about how scary it was. I mean, they really sold it! So obviously I had to check it out. But my TBR is organized by publication date and this is a new novel. So, dammit, I have to go outside the shelf AGAIN for another Malerman novel.I regret nothing. This is a spectacular book!Eight-year-old Bela has a good life. She’s got her Mommy and Daddo who love each other. When they throw parties, she’s got a babysitter, Kelvin, whom she adores. And at night, when everyone’s asleep, she’s got Other Mommy who comes out of her closet and floats above her bed. Sometimes Other Mommy’s face is on upside down. Sometimes her eyes are on the top of her head. Sometimes she asks Bela a very simple question, “Can I come into your heart?”So far, Bela has been unable to answer.But that’s what friends do, isn’t it? They help each other.But if I let you in, Bela asks, where would I go?She would go where Other Mommy is from.The closet?No, Other Mommy doesn’t come from the closet.But still Bela doesn’t answer.Then Mommy and Daddo throw a party and Other Mommy is seen and the partygoers freak out. Then Other Mommy is talking to Bela in her room one night when Mommy walks in and sees her and she freaks out (this was the scene that really made me sit up and take notice) and the family leaves the house and goes to a friend’s house, but they see Other Mommy too, so the family has to leave and they go to Gramma Ruth’s house, but Other Mommy shows up there, too, so they flee to a friend of Gramma Ruth’s, Evelyn. That night, Bela has to use the bathroom, but everyone is asleep and they’ve all agreed to stay together, but Bela really has to go.“It’s the bathroom.I think of Kelvin telling me I did a good job.I step in and close the door. Evelyn? I ask.I think that’s her behind the shower curtain. It looks like Evelyn is sitting in the bathtub behind the shower curtain. Evelyn? I say again. I’m sorry. I had to pee.She’s not moving. She’s just sitting there.I’m far from the yellow room now. Evelyn?I go to the shower curtain and I look through the plastic and I see her looking back at me and I pull the curtain aside.There’s nobody in the bathtub.The wall is painted black where I thought I saw Evelyn sitting.There’s no water.No Evelyn.”I read this scene in the middle of the morning while the sun was out and the world was awake and there were birds chirping outside, but I was home alone on a day off, the kids were at school and my wife was at work and I was fully CREEPED out. And I don’t get creeped out. I’ve been living the horror life for almost 52 years now. I. Don’t. Get. Creeped. Out.But that scene, and what follows, which I did not quote here because you have to read it yourself to get the full brunt, but holy crap!, creeped me the F out.The cover blurb from Grady Hendrix, himself a pretty big name in the current horror field, proclaims this novel to be “the monster that lives inside your closet.” And he’s not wrong.Malerman hasn’t just written a ghost story, he’s written THE ghost story for the modern age. In a time when everything is online, when most horror stories of the past could have been avoided with simple cell service, Josh Malerman has written a ghost story where modern technology is used to the fullest extent, but even then, some things are just too terrifyingly real for the characters thrust into this situation.And he pulls no punches, and he does all the things you scream at the page in other novels for the characters NOT doing. They flee, they tell people, they call the police, they try to enlist the aid of the church, they hire a paranormal investigator. At no point does the family try to go it alone. And every time they involve someone else, Other Mommy shows herself, and every time it’s a scene right out of a nightmare.Having read only two of his books previously, I can’t vouch for his usual level of horror—BIRD BOX did have some amazingly vivid and tense scenes, though—but I can say his writing is tight and energetic, that his prose has motion and carries the reader along at a brisk pace almost from start to finish.In those previous two novels, I don’t think I would have called him a stylist, necessarily. But Malerman, in his THIS IS HORROR interview, said the process for writing this book was different. Usually he writes with music, but he wrote this book in silence, and being a silent writer myself, I think the loss of that particular distraction helps an author to better connect with the flow and the language (at least, I hope it does because I miss being able to write to music!), and if that’s what helped him write some of these lines, then by all means, trash your record collection, or at least move it out of the office, Josh, because this is some beautifully creepy language:“Kelvin just stares at me. He’s not moving. I can’t tell what part of me he’s looking at. It’s like he’s looking at all of me.I step to the side to get around him and he’s still just staring where I was. Like I’m still there. I’ll be right back up, I say. Bela, he says.His voice is lower now. Bela, I can keep your parents together. Thanks, I say.I’m backing away from him. He’s still standing by the window. I think his clothes only cover the front of him. I think the back of him is crouching in the dark.”I read that passage on my porch swing on a bright, sunny Saturday morning while my wife was at jiu jitsu, and I was glad to be outside because that image is already etched forever in my mind, I didn’t need the added pressure of an old creaky house around me at the same time.I read fiction primarily on breaks at work, and I usually do the math first. I need to read this many pages to finish this book in this many days. But yesterday I read the final 120 pages of this book in two sittings in one day because the prose just flies by so quickly, and because the story was so damn good and unsettling, I HAD to see what happened next, and what happened next, and what happened after that, and so on. I can’t remember the last novel I did that with, but it’s been a while.Now, having said all that, I still want to be as objective as possible, and as such, I have to say the third act, when the family figures out how to fight Other Mommy fell a little flat for me. I mean, it was perfectly-written, as was everything else in this novel, but, man, everything before was so big and so strong, I feel like Malerman wrote himself into an impossible corner and gave in to the fear for a moment and came up with a solution that, while it made sense, felt like it might have been meant for a different novel; it didn’t fit this world as perfectly as I’d hoped it would. I saw the seams and some of them were frayed. But still, I read the last 40 pages in one sitting, at night on the couch, which is NOT my best reading time; I’m usually half-asleep by 8:30, but I was up and ready to go, completely engaged and immersed in the book, desperate to see how it ended.When I finished BIRD BOX, I thought, man, people should read this book. I was only a few chapters into INCIDENTS AROUND THE HOUSE before I was telling my wife and our daughter, “You need to read this book.” And so do you. Any- and everyone reading this review, stop what you’re doing, shelve whatever book you’re currently reading, and get a copy of this one because it’s gonna knock your socks off, stuff em in your mouth, and drag you kicking into the second pantry closet at the end of the hallway upstairs.

Malerman is probably best known as the author of Bird Box, which was both a runaway hit and, in my opinion, quite a good book. So I was pretty excited to check this one out. I was even more excited when I found that it centers on a family whose young daughter is interacting with a mysterious and malevolent supernatural entity she calls “Other Mommy.” Partly that excited me simply because that sounds like quite a good story, but I also admit my own interest level was a bit higher in this case because it reminded me quite a bit about an allegedly true ghost story I wrote up in one of my own books which also included a child seeing an “other mommy.” So I was ready to go.As soon as I started reading, though, I was a bit nervous. The novel opens with an author’s note explaining that its unusual format is intentional because it’s meant to be told from the perspective of a child. Fair enough on some level. I’m all in favor of a book from the perspective of the child. However, I’m not ordinarily a fan of experimental formats, and as I read on, I can confirm that the experimental format here does NOT work effectively and serves as much more of a distraction and impediment to enjoyment than as a mechanism to make it sound like it was written by a child.The child’s point of view in the novel is further undermined by the fact that the narrative voice never quite sounds like a genuine eight-year-old. Neither does it sound like an adult. Rather, it’s in this uncanny middle ground where it sounds exactly like what it is: a grown man trying to write like a young girl. The narrator in this story manages to use words like “blanched” and reference Abraham Lincoln without skipping a beat on the one hand, but then gets other words wrong and fails to comprehend the seriousness of her own situation on the other. It just doesn’t make sense and fails both in terms of literary style and in terms of character development.However, not everything is terrible. The plot is pretty stereotypical but it’s certainly interesting enough and spooky enough, and I have to give the author credit where it’s due: he didn’t force his adult characters to disbelieve in the obvious supernatural occurrences for far too long, as far too many other novels about children seeing ghosts or demons tend to do. They’re initially skeptical but once the evidence is in, they realize what’s happening at approximately the pace one would expect rational people to do under similar circumstances, so the book deserves a lot of credit there.And once you manage to get past the formatting—if you manage to get past it—the plot will take you down a creepy road to an ending that may not have the horrific oomph one hopes for in a horror novel but nevertheless brings the whole thing to a satisfactory close.So this is kind of a middle of the road book for me. I’d give it good marks for plot, a passing grade for characterization, and a failing grade for format and technical execution.

Horror for bored, white, stay-at-home housewives. This sucked. Could have majorly benefited from a 150-page edit; way too long and redundant and literally NOTHING HAPPENED. Biggest disappointment of the year.

If you've ever studied horror writing, one thing you'll learn early on is the idea that your readers imaginations will be far more terrifying than anything you could describe in full, and Josh Malerman has a stranglehold on this technique. He pulled it off masterfully in Bird Box, and he's back with this b.s. in Incidents Around the House ("b.s." being used in the most endearing way possible).This go around, we're introduced to Bela, the eight-year-old narrator who has developed a friendship with a malevolent specter in her closet whom she calls "Other Mommy." Her actual Mommy, Ursula, and her "Daddo", Russ, have been a bit caught up in their own lives to pay much attention to their daughter and her friend, who wants Bela to allow her into Bela's heart. Bela has done a decent job on her own denying Other Mommy her request, but Other Mommy is nothing if not insistent. She begins to invade Bela's life in increasingly threatening ways, and it isn't long before Bela's parents realize their daughter is in some serious danger.Then the craziness begins.Incidents Around the House is like a mashup of Tobe Hooper's 1982 classic film Poltergeist and David Robert Mitchell's 2014 indie horror It Follows. A middle-American family inexplicably find themselves haunted by something from the closet (something that desperately wants their daughter) and, in their desperation to be rid of it, hire "experts" who are just as clueless as they are. In Poltergeist, however, the family are unable to leave their home due to their daughter being snatched up by the entity shortly after making itself known. In Incidents, though, running is an option, but it doesn't matter because Other Mommy isn't confined to the house either. And, unlike the spirits in Poltergeist, she has no problems offing anyone if doing so gets her closer to what she wants.The most noticeable aspect of Incidents is that the narrator is eight years old, and somehow the format of the text is supposed to reflect this -- center justification for dialogue and left justification for action. Not sure how this translates to "eight-year-old", though, as it seems more like an excuse to avoid using quotation marks than anything else. But the choice to tell this story from the child's perspective was a smart one. Bela's internal conflicts against Other Mommy's psychological advances, as well as her struggles to understand her parents' very real adult problems, are just as central to the text as the physical threat of Other Mommy herself. Bela often withholds important information from the adults who are trying to save her, and sometimes lies outright about things, which serves only to complicate an already-insurmountable problem, ratcheting up the tension and cranking the "dial of dread" to 11.All of this, though, is undermined by the inauthenticity of Bela's narrative voice. Most of the time, she sounds younger than she actually is, which can probably be explained away by the fact that she's had very little social interaction with children her own age. But there are times when she sounds much older, particularly during those moments when she's able to recall pages of dialogue she either overhears or had directly spoken to her. This is dialogue that is spoken by adults in adult language, and it's pretty sus that Bela is able to rattle it all off from memory without a hitch.Malerman would have done well to have given some of these conversations the same treatment he gives his scares: leave them up to the readers' imaginations. In a narrative that's already thematically shallow, it's pretty insulting to take what's there and have it explained to us like an adult explaining it to a child (literally). A little nuance and finesse can work wonders in creating the illusion of depth, and you'd think that Malerman would know this considering how well he does these things for the creep factor.And really, aren't we here for the scares anyway? Thankfully, Malerman is really really good at producing them because he knows to give away just enough and let our imaginations fill in the blanks. We never get a cohesive description of Other Mommy, for example, but, like in Bird Box, the way characters who get an eyeful of her react to her is enough to give us the heebah jeebs. Pair that with the few unnerving descriptions we do get -- of her appearance, how she sounds, how she moves -- personally (and this coming from a guy who's read a lot of horror and is pretty inured to it) my heebahs were jeebing all over the place.And what more could I ask from a horror novel than that?

I must admit, I was surprised at the amount of people that didn't like this book. I'm not sure what they were looking for, but Josh Malerman has written a quintessential horror novel. Malerman has been very successful so far, but I've always found myself just on the cusp of becoming a fan. Previously, meandering climaxes and lack of genuine scares have occasionally disappointed. "Incidents" suffers from none of that. True, gut-wrenching horror is what this book provides. Bravo.