Incidents Around The House

My quest for good horror novels continues with Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around The House, potentially one of the scariest and most effective horror novels I’ve ever read that stumbles badly in two ways. One of those is inherent in its premise and makes me question how viable the book ever could have been; the other, frustratingly, was entirely avoidable.

Our narrator is Bela, a girl of a young but unspecified age (I’m guessing five or six, based on the fact that she attends school). Bela has the kinds of problems a lot of kids this age do: her Mommy and Daddo don’t laugh and joke around the way they used to, and Bela has cottoned on to the fact that Mommy is having an affair, and the Other Mommy who comes out of Bela’s closet at night has been acting in new and frightening ways, appearing outside of Bela’s room and doing things she never did before. And she keeps insistently asking Bela a question: “Can I come into your heart?”

I have frequently lamented the inability of some horror writers to write believable children, so I’ll give Incidents Around The House plaudits for its protagonist: Bela feels extremely believably-written, not just in her authorial voice but in her psychology. The book really nails the gulf of communication that exists between adults and children; repeatedly throughout the book, Bela withholds crucial information from her parents, either because she’s worried she’ll somehow get in trouble for telling them what she knows, or because she just doesn’t have the vocabulary to express something in words. The multiple scenes where she replies “I don’t know” to an important question even though her narration makes it clear that she does know the answer are frustrating to read, but they also feel completely true to life. It’s a very rare case where you could almost believe an actual child co-authored the story somehow.

Where the keenly observed psychology really shines is in how Bela interacts with Other Mommy. As the story goes on it gradually dawns on the reader that Other Mommy is not actually a ghost, but is something far stranger and more frightening. In fact ‘she’ might not have a form that actually resembles a human woman at all, this simply being the closest analogue that a very young Bela applied to the thing in her closet. Since Bela has been seeing Other Mommy for about as long as she can remember—so long that her recollection of their earliest interactions is already fuzzy—she doesn’t find any of this scary, at least not until Other Mommy starts appearing in places she didn’t used to. It’s not until adults see her too that we, the reader, cotton on via the sanity-blasting aftereffects that this entity is much, much more horrific than what Bela’s perspective had led us to believe.

(This is also used for effective comedy in a few scenes, when Bela casually describes Other Mommy doing something that would be pants-shittingly terrifying to an adult, but which she finds completely unremarkable. As many a reddit thread can attest to, young kids do sometimes say incredibly eerie shit when their imaginations run away with them; Incidents Around The House posits a scenario where some of that eerie shit is actually real).

The fact that adults do see Other Mommy leads me to one of the most refreshing aspects of the story, which is that it dispenses with the ‘skeptical parent’ trope very early on, when Bela’s mother walks in on Other Mommy sitting on Bela’s bed and immediately jumps into Defcon-1 emergency mode. It looks for a while like Bela’s dad is going to be the doubting Thomas figure, but after a false alarm he starts to believe his wife and daughter fully even before he sees Other Mommy for himself. The book is only in your typical slow-build haunted house mode for maybe a quarter of its page count, if that, and then the family are off on a harrowing attempt to stay one step ahead of the thing stalking Bela.

This, unfortunately, brings me to my first criticism of the book, although not the first fatal one. See, it turns out there’s a reason a lot of haunted house stories use that slow-build template: because it’s great at filling up time while keeping the reader engaged. If you dispense with it, you have to substitute something else in its place, and Incidents Around The House doesn’t quite manage to do that.

Specifically, there’s a long segment in the middle where Bela and her parents (and then also Bela’s maternal grandmother) drive around from place to place trying to escape Other Mommy or find help. All of these scenes follow a very similar formula: they arrive at a place, the adults are frazzled and temperamental and argue over the breakdown of Bela’s parents’ marriage that’s happening in the middle of all of this, Bela thinks she senses Other Mommy’s presence but isn’t entirely sure, then Other Mommy appears and does something scary and everyone runs away to a new location. The most pointless of these scenes (and the first moment when the book majorly strained credulity in order to force through a plot point, but far from the last) is when the family decamp to the house of the man that Bela’s mother has been cheating with, where they don’t even spend a full night before fleeing.

That wasn’t where my patience really wore thin, though. The moment that almost made me give up on the book before finishing it is when the family go to stay with one of Grandma Ruth’s friends. During this scene they all arrive obviously traumatised and shaken, the friend who owns the house clearly realises there’s something they’re not telling her but welcomes them in anyway, there’s a long conversation where she probes them for more information and they deflect her enquiries poorly, then Other Mommy appears and they have to escape the house.

The problem with this whole part of the book is that this exact same sequence of events already happened earlier, when Bela and her parents arrived at Grandma Ruth’s house, down to the “old woman who the family are seeking help from realises something is up and tries to get more information” bit. I might have been able to tolerate this as the repetition illustrating the hopeless situation the characters are in, if not for the fact that it’s part of a much longer sequence where the protagonists drive around aimlessly running into dead ends. The story is clearly just spinning its wheels here, trying to fill time.

Now, there are brand new Other Mommy manifestations sprinkled in through all of this, and those should be able to take up the slack. Other Mommy is a seethingly malevolent entity, one of the best fictional ghosts (or demons, or whatever she is) ever put to page, and the book always handles her presence wonderfully whether it’s going subtle or loud, modes it switches back and forth between with very adept pacing.

Note that I said the scare scenes should take up the slack.

The thing is, fairly early on in the book I found myself a bit puzzled. Just in terms of what happens in them, Other Mommy’s manifestations are some of the most creative, creepiest ghost scenes I’ve ever read in fiction. I cannot overstate how good they are, in theory. And yet, I consistently found myself deflated by them, for reasons I initially couldn’t articulate. Have I just become jaded with time? Am I really so out of touch?

No, I eventually decided, it’s the children who are wrong! Or rather one child, specifically Bela. The entire book is narrated by her in a child-like way, which mercifully doesn’t mean goo-goo-gah-gah baby speak or deliberate misspellings or anything awful like that. Rather, her authorial voice is just very blunt and plainly spoken, tending to describe things in very sparse detail and without a lot of writerly flourishes. This is especially true when it comes to things she’s very familiar with, such as her parents, her house, the area she lives in… and Other Mommy, who, remember, she has been seeing since before she could form coherent memories.

What this means is that the scary scenes, while brilliant in their conception, are completely lacking in tension or atmosphere, narrated as they are in a flavourless “and then this happened” manner which robs them of all of their power. Some scenes do manage to rise above this issue, usually the simpler ones like when Bela is trying to sleep at night and she thinks she can hear someone breathing in the room with her, but so many others fall flat because of how they’re delivered.

This is not a trivial problem. It’s serious enough that it makes me question whether the basic concept behind the book was workable to begin with. It blows a massive, gaping hole right through the story’s core conceit. Maybe there was a way to work around it, but the version of Incidents Around The House we actually got doesn’t manage to.

There are, unfortunately, even more problems that come towards the end of the story. When the faffing around I complained about earlier finally ends, the plot gets shunted towards its climax by a side character showing up and suggesting a course of action against Other Mommy that makes absolutely no sense. By that I don’t mean that if you tried it in real life it wouldn’t work, I mean it makes no sense for the character in question to come up with this idea or think that it would be effective. It relies on a gigantic leap of logic regarding Other Mommy’s motivations, which is based on absolutely no prior evidence or experience. Tellingly, the book uses Bela’s perspective to glide over the conversation where the character in question pitches this idea to Bela’s parents, which means we don’t get a scene where someone asks her how she arrived at the conclusion that doing this extremely weird and non-intuitive thing is going to do help. It seems very obvious to me that this specific sequence of events needed to take place for the story to arrive at its intended conclusion, so the author just shoved it in by any means necessary and then papered over the resulting cracks.

(While I’m on the topic, this element of the story also involves Bela’s grandmother telling someone she doesn’t know very well an extremely sensitive family secret, which is another place where it looks like the book is desperately trying to crowbar in a plot turn that wouldn’t otherwise make sense).

Speaking of the story’s intended conclusion, it’s a huge let-down, one of those endings that had me checking the progress bar on my Kindle and going “Wait, really? I’m actually on the last chapter?”. I obviously don’t want to go into spoilers, but it’s a similar issue to what you see in the Paranormal Activity movies where the demon spends the whole movie slowly trolling the characters before doing something that it seems like it would have been capable of doing the whole time. I get what the intention was: a tragedy where Bela’s parents are so absorbed in their own emotional hang-ups that they’re unable to take the threat posed by Other Mommy at face value and end up getting into their own heads and doing things that make the situation worse instead of helping. But the way it’s executed is so abrupt and sudden that it makes all of the preceding chapters feel completely pointless. Taken together with the pacing issues I described earlier, it really makes me wonder whether this book was originally a short story or a novella, as the ending would be appropriate for those formats but feels utterly anticlimactic for a full-length novel.

I don’t enjoy walking away from this book with such a negative attitude. There’s a lot about it that I like, and even more that could have been good. It’s a brand of horror that I’ve been saying I want more of for years, one that relies more on inference and suggestion than simply putting scary things on the page like it’s describing a scene from a horror movie. It has a really well-realised main character. Other Mommy is one of the best horror antagonists I’ve ever encountered. But the different components of its basic concept are irreconcilably at odds with each other, and the story drags its feet for far too long before rushing to an unsatisfying conclusion.