advance review: Incidents Around the House (Malerman, 2024)
Book: Incidents Around the House
Author: Josh Malerman
Publisher: Del Ray
ISBN: 9780593723128
Publication Date: Jun 25, 2024
Capone’s Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ of 5⭐
Summary (spoilers by implication possible but not explicitly given)
Wow. In two days of fierce reading and constantly wondering what was to happen to Malerman’s latest protagonist, I found myself feeling creeped out. This says a lot, if you consider that I read some sixty to eighty horror books per year and cannot recall the last time one of them actually frightened me. I don’t read for the frights or thrills—I read for the questions that horror literature explores. Because I was raised a philosopher, I read for the philosophical questions horror explores through its symbols and stand-ins, its exaggerations and moral outsiders.
Yet somehow, Malerman’s Incidents Around the House, a forthcoming novel that read like it was forty rather than nearly four-hundred pages long, managed both to ask complex questions about familial relationships and willful social ignorance of a family in chaos as well as to scare the hell out of me.
The plot is simple, but the premise is unique and reminiscent of the oddity found in Malerman’s earlier Pearl or Inspection, the down-home setting from Goblin and its environs brought back around for this tale of isolation. A family is haunted. The perspective is that of a child—an eight-year old. A [usually] closet-dwelling sometimes corporeal entity with a long, often upside-down face wants to be let “into [Bela’s] heart.” What letting the creature in would mean, exactly, isn’t clear. However, the sense the reader gets is that allowing the presence, AKA “Other Mommy,” into Bela’s heart would be at the least allowing a ghost to share in her soul, and in the worse case an expulsion of Bela into an unknown plane of existence for at minimum one lifetime. Pretty stinkin’ bad stuff, in other words.
Malerman sets up this premise and stakes. Then, instead of having everyone question the young protagonist’s sanity and tell the story of a girl who sees dead things no one else can see, asks, “What if everyone can see this thing? What then?” What if anyone can see it but no one cares enough to help outside of those trying to protect themselves and Bela from her haunting. I’ll spare the reader any other potential spoilers and offer the closing thought that Malerman’s entity, Other Mommy, will be something I think about for a not insignificant amount of time when next I go to bed and shut out my lights.
Author: Josh Malerman
Publisher: Del Ray
ISBN: 9780593723128
Publication Date: Jun 25, 2024
Capone’s Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ of 5⭐
Summary (spoilers by implication possible but not explicitly given)
Wow. In two days of fierce reading and constantly wondering what was to happen to Malerman’s latest protagonist, I found myself feeling creeped out. This says a lot, if you consider that I read some sixty to eighty horror books per year and cannot recall the last time one of them actually frightened me. I don’t read for the frights or thrills—I read for the questions that horror literature explores. Because I was raised a philosopher, I read for the philosophical questions horror explores through its symbols and stand-ins, its exaggerations and moral outsiders.
Yet somehow, Malerman’s Incidents Around the House, a forthcoming novel that read like it was forty rather than nearly four-hundred pages long, managed both to ask complex questions about familial relationships and willful social ignorance of a family in chaos as well as to scare the hell out of me.
The plot is simple, but the premise is unique and reminiscent of the oddity found in Malerman’s earlier Pearl or Inspection, the down-home setting from Goblin and its environs brought back around for this tale of isolation. A family is haunted. The perspective is that of a child—an eight-year old. A [usually] closet-dwelling sometimes corporeal entity with a long, often upside-down face wants to be let “into [Bela’s] heart.” What letting the creature in would mean, exactly, isn’t clear. However, the sense the reader gets is that allowing the presence, AKA “Other Mommy,” into Bela’s heart would be at the least allowing a ghost to share in her soul, and in the worse case an expulsion of Bela into an unknown plane of existence for at minimum one lifetime. Pretty stinkin’ bad stuff, in other words.
Malerman sets up this premise and stakes. Then, instead of having everyone question the young protagonist’s sanity and tell the story of a girl who sees dead things no one else can see, asks, “What if everyone can see this thing? What then?” What if anyone can see it but no one cares enough to help outside of those trying to protect themselves and Bela from her haunting. I’ll spare the reader any other potential spoilers and offer the closing thought that Malerman’s entity, Other Mommy, will be something I think about for a not insignificant amount of time when next I go to bed and shut out my lights.
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