Gabino Iglesias Reviews Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman
Incidents Around the House, Josh Malerman (Del Rey 978-0-59372-312-8, $28.00, 384pp, hc) June 2024.
After so many great novels – Bird Box, Goblin, Black Mad Wheel, Daphne – perhaps the most impressive thing about Josh Malerman is that he seems to be getting better with each new novel. That’s certainly the case with Incidents Around the House, which is the author’s fastest, sharpest, creepiest novel to date.
Bela is eight years old and her life is fairly simple. She loves her mom and dad, whom she calls Mommy and Daddo and she loves her Grandma Ruth and dancing. Unfortunately, it’s not all good. Sure, Mommy and Daddo sometimes fight and when they drink a lot they sit in Bela’s bed and tell her things when they think she’s asleep, but the worst is Other Mommy. Other Mommy lives in the closet, although Bela sometimes sees her in the bathroom and in other places. Other Mommy comes out at night, hanging from the ceiling upside down, slithering with her belly against the floor, and sometimes even sitting next to Bela in bed. Bela thought Other Mommy was her friend at the start, but now she’s not so sure. Other Mommy is a bit scary now, and she keeps asking Bela the same question: ‘‘Can I go inside your heart?’’ Bela manages to deal with Other Mommy all by herself for a while, but when other people start seeing her, she becomes a problem. Before she can figure out how to solve things, Bela and her family find themselves on the road, afraid to go home and haunted by Other Mommy wherever they go, and she is getting bolder and more aggressive with each place they try to hide in.
Incidents Around the House is very fast and relentlessly creepy. Seeing everything from Bela’s perspective adds layers to the narrative, especially because the world she knew, and the trust she had in her parents as her protectors, falls apart very quickly. Horror only works in the presence of empathy, and Malerman nailed that here.
Besides empathy, the narrative’s unique narrator is the first of three elements of this novel that merit attention. Bela is very young, so there are no longwinded paragraphs about the nature of Other Mommy, there’s just fear and confusion. Some of the adults try to break things down and ask questions, but what readers get is mostly from the point of view of a scared child trying to navigate a scary supernatural event while her family falls apart around her. Also, there are several scenes in which the adults forget to listen to Bela, and those are wonderfully frustrating.
The second element is pacing. This novel almost demands to be read in a single sitting. Between short sentences, dialogue that uses spacing instead of quotation marks, and Malerman’s very effective use of line breaks, this thick novel reads like a novella, and that’s a good thing.
Lastly, the straightforward way in which the author tackles Other Mommy is great. Sure, we’re anxious about when and where she is going to show up next, but we know exactly what she looks like and sort of understand what she wants (I won’t spoil that here!). The result is a creepy monster that we see several times, and while the descriptions should be enough to make her a little less scary, they actually have the opposite effect.
Full of tension, deep in unexpected ways, clearly tied to Malerman’s previous work (Bela and her family drive through and then stay in someone’s house in the town of Goblin) and constantly moving forward at breakneck speed, Incidents Around the House is Malerman’s best novel so far, and that’s saying a lot. Don’t miss this one, but keep an eye on your closets while you read it.
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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and book reviewer living in Austin TX. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides. His work has been nominated to the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2019. His short stories have appeared in a plethora of anthologies and his non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and CrimeReads. His work has been published in five languages, optioned for film, and praised by authors as diverse as Roxane Gay, David Joy, Jerry Stahl, and Meg Gardiner. His reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other print and online venues. He’s been a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards twice and has judged the PANK Big Book Contest, the Splatterpunk Awards, and the Newfound Prose Prize. He teaches creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University’s online MFA program. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
This review and more like it in the August 2024 issue of Locus.
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