Incidents Around the House, by Josh Malerman

[rachelmanija]

The first time I told Mommy and Daddo about Other Mommy they laughed. It was good-night time and I told Mommy good night and then I said it again and Mommy said,

Why do you say that twice, Bela?

And I said,

I was saying good night to Other Mommy.

Daddo laughed and shut the light and they left my room, but I saw Mommy look back once through the crack in the door. Her eyes looked right at mine. Then she and Daddo went to their own bedroom.

Then Other Mommy made the grunting sound she makes when she stands up on the other side of my bed, in the space between my bed and the wall, when she's been crouched down there on the carpet waiting for them to leave.

A horror novel narrated by a very young girl, about the Other Mommy who lives in her closet and keeps asking, "Can I come into your heart?"

(I assume Other Mommy is a nod to Coraline's Other Mother, which was uhhh kind of unfortunate timing.)

The sample above is how the whole book is written. That sort of thing can sometimes drive me nuts, but it was extremely effective in this. I read the book in a single sitting, and then had to stay up very late reading something less creepy and twitching every time my cats moved.

The first quarter or so of this book is one of the most effective pieces of horror I've ever read. There's no violence or gore, and it's utterly chilling, tapping into childhood fears of things in the closet and under the bed and glimpsed in the corner of your eye. A big part of the fear is that Other Mommy doesn't come into clear focus - Bela knows what she looks like, so only mentions attributes when they're relevant - and every tiny bit of detail that she drops is utterly horrific. It approaches the original story "The Monkey's Paw" in terms of the evocation of sheer dread by what you don't see.

If the first quarter or so had a satisfying ending and then stopped, it would be a basically perfect horror novella. Unfortunately, it continues. Much of the rest of the book consists of the exact same event happening in slightly different contexts FOUR TIMES. But the larger problem with where the story goes after the first part is that it takes the Other Mommy, who is terrifying because what she is and what she wants is so unknown and maybe unknowable, and brings her more into the light, where she promptly becomes less scary. The conclusion is depressing, doesn't quite follow from previous setup, and is sufficiently confusing that it prompted multiple posts to r/horrorlit asking "What happened at the end?"

So, do I recommend this book? Well... the first bit is SO good. If you're interested in horror or writing horror, yes, it's good enough to read for pure enjoyment and as a masterclass in how to evoke more by revealing less.

The rest of the book, eh. It's good in parts. Bela's mother is a borderline misogynist stereotype of the bad cheating wife, though at least there's other normal women to balance her out, and her bad marriage with a saintly doormat is maddening to read. Bela's own narration is pretty convincing as that of a four or five-year-old, so I was surprised to re-read the blurb and see that she's supposed to be eight. What. No. (Her parents treat her like she's four but monologue at her like she's their therapist, but then again, they're AWFUL parents.)

Spoilers!

After about the first quarter, other people start seeing Other Mommy. This is REALLY effective when it first happens. But then...

Bela's parents see her and are so terrified that they take Bela and flee the house. They stay with friends, but then Other Mommy appears and the friends kick them out. They go to her grandmother's house, but Other Mommy appears there and they all flee. Other Mommy kills the man Bela's mother is having an affair with, so they all go to his house because he's dead so it's empty (what), but Other Mommy appears there and they all flee. They go to the grandmother's friend's house, but Other Mommy appears there and they all flee. Some of the individual moments are chilling, but it's cumulatively very repetitive.

Somewhere in there it's determined that the Other Mommy is probably a demon trying to possess Bela, and that's what "go inside your heart" means. Previously, Other Mommy felt totally inexplicable, and I liked that better. We know what demons and possession are; they're scary but not anywhere near as scary as something totally outside of human understanding. I also liked not knowing exactly what "can I come inside your heart?" meant. Let us use our own imaginations to terrify ourselves, Malerman!

Anyway, eventually Bela's useless parents figure out that running around won't help. After they fail to get help from a priest and some amateur spiritualists, they return home and fortify it with alarm systems and attack dogs. Why they think this will help against a demon... whatever, they're idiots. Also, at this point basically everyone can see Other Mommy, so they probably should have tried harder to find some ghostbusters because if they really had a demon that literally everyone could see, ghostbusters would be all over it.

Finally, advised by a friend who is also an idiot, they decide that Other Mommy is attracted to Bela because of her innocence, so they try to take that away by telling her their deep dark secret, which is that her compulsively cheating mother cheated with her father while she was married to another man, and Bela is her first husband's child.

Bela is so upset by this that she stops trusting her parents and lies that Other Mommy is gone. Other Mommy promptly kills her parents and grandmother. This doesn't make sense to me. If Other Mommy wants to possess Bela, wouldn't she rather possess a girl with a family than a girl who's going to get kicked around foster care? Then Other Mommy asks Bela if she can go inside her heart, and Bela agrees. They switch places - Other Mommy now has Bela's body, and Bela goes wherever Other Mommy came from. It's unclear what/where that actually is. I think Bela becomes the sort of creature Other Mommy was, and maybe goes on to haunt some other child in the hope of taking over her body and life.

I did not care for this ending. Apart from that it's depressing and confusing, it seems like Bela says yes because with her entire family dead, she has nothing left to lose. If that's the case, Other Mommy could have killed Bela's family and made her say yes at any time, so why not do that earlier? Also, one of the many ways Bela's family went wrong was that they never asked her if she ever wanted to say yes; if they had, they'd have learned that she kind of did because she found Other Mommy exciting. So why ditch the much more interesting "temptation" aspect in favor of "I might as well because you murdered my whole family?"

As for what Other Mommy actually is, she seems to be lured by or a manifestation of Bela's upset over her parents' bad marriage. So there's an unfortunate implication of everything bad happening because of the compulsively cheating wife.



Content notes: extreme spookiness, child in danger. There's some violence but it's extremely underplayed, non-graphic, and/or off-page.

Comments

[scioscribe]

I love the premise and cover of this, and the beginning sounds so enticing, but everything else + how deeply meh I was on the Bird Box movie is moving me away from it. Which means I'll go ahead and read the spoilery bits here--

Uh, that sure is an ending. (Although I'm enjoying LOLing at the idea of trying to ward off a demon with a home security system.) On top of everything else, wouldn't Other Mommy possessing Bela and taking over her life have more of an impact if we then got to see, say, "Bela" interacting with her parents when we know she's actually Other Mommy now? By killing off the people who know Bela, you've killed off the creepiness of "this looks like Bela, but it isn't Bela!"

[rachelmanija]

It ends as like two paragraphs after she says yes!

My biggest WTF moment was when they decide to go live in the house of the mom's dead lover because she has a key and the body was removed lime a few hours ago.

[pauraque]

I feel like I read a different book that had the same problem where the author had written an excellent preschooler POV, except the character was actually supposed to be in grade school. Is this a common problem?

[rachelmanija]

Yes, I feel like I come across it fairly often. Also the opposite, where a child feels too old for their stated age, but too young is more common.

[osprey_archer]

The eight-year-old who sounds like a four-year-old is so maddening to me, and, as you say, it's weirdly common in adult books with child characters. Even if the authors never interact with children, you'd think they might have some memory of being eight?

[mildred_of_midgard]

Huh, I always feel like it's the other way around. Kids in books are always doing things where I'm like "No way" and mentally add at least 5 years to their ages.

[sovay]

So why ditch the much more interesting "temptation" aspect in favor of "I might as well because you murdered my whole family?"

This sounds like so, so much wasted potential.

[lokifan]

For REAL

[sushiflop]

Authors who want to write kid POVs would in general really benefit from spending a few months volunteering at an elementary school.

[thomasyan]

Finished this recently. as you say, it starts off great, and then gets repetitive, and the ending is bewildering and abrupt. I wasn't sure if Other Mommy had killed her parents and grandmother, or merely knocked them out. I'll have to reread the ending, but I thought Bela said yes partly in hopes that Other Mommy could get her parents back together.

There was that whole big speech by her grandmother of how a house can be bigger than you think. There was earlier musing about how even nice people and animals, like their pet cat, can turn mean if they feel trapped. And how Other Mommy used to be a friend, and friendly, and comforting, and exciting.

So maybe we're supposed to think this Other Place is bigger than expected. That Other Mommy, and now Bela, started as basically good, but did/will turn mean as they get desperate.

the repetition and ending are disappointing. I'm trying to figure out if there's a good stopping point, like getting on the boat for Smilla's Sense of Snow.

[rachelmanija]

Great insights. I feel like you could stop when the parents flee the house.