The first thing I have to warn you is that if you purchase Josh Malerman's Incidents Around The House, it will have a sticker on it saying it's a movie now. If that's a dealbreaker, there's no escaping it, because the movie is coming out next week and because it features one of the all-time fucked-up jump scares in a trailer. I almost can't believe that was allowed. Anyway, yes, this is the book that Other Mommy is based on. But several Defector staffers have previously read it and won't shut up about how good it is.
The second thing to warn you about is that this book is scary. I am not a baby, and I read a decent amount of horror, and it's been a long, long time since I read anything that had me jumpy about leaving my bed in the middle of the night. My all-time favorites are Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and Michael McDowell's The Elementals, and I won't really hesitate to put Incidents up there with those. It's not postmodern/lit/"elevated horror," like so many of today's horror novelists seem to aspire to. This is the classic shit.
Incidents Around The House is narrated by Bela, an 8-year-old girl who for some time has been visited by ... something that lives in her closet, but is not confined to it. She calls this something Other Mommy, because it looks like her mother—mostly, and sometimes—and it asks her, in increasingly threatening tones, if it can go inside her heart. She tells her parents about Other Mommy, and the book is about them not trying to figure out what it is, but rather if there is any way to escape it.
A pretty simple plot, spelled out like that. But the magic is that Malerman discards some of the most traditional rules of ghost stories and haunted house stories. Other Mommy can leave the house. Other people can see it. There is never any doubt from any character that Other Mommy is real. Combined with some nifty storytelling techniques (Albert wrote about it when it came out, with light spoilers), it's a constant low-level dread, ratcheting up to excruciating tension and, yes, the occasional jump scare.
For our next Defector Reads A Book, we'll be letting Other Mommy inside our hearts and discussing Incidents Around The House on Tuesday, October 27. You can purchase it from Bookshop.org, at your favorite local bookstore, or rent it from your local library. See you then. You might want to read it with your lights on.
