What’s the book? Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman
How dark is it? Light grey. Like, so light it’s almost just plain white.
How good is it? I give it 1/10 hauntings. Did not enjoy.
The book is narrated by Bela, a young child being haunted by a mysterious entity calling itself her “other mother.” The entity wants Bela to let it “into her heart” so it can use Bela’s body to reincarnate. If Bela agrees to this plan, her own soul will go . . . somewhere else. The entity is pretty vague about where. The entire book revolves around Bela and this haunting, so connecting with this character is key to enjoying the book.
I did not connect to Bela at all. I’m guessing Josh Malerman doesn’t spend much time around kids because Bela doesn’t sound like any kid I’ve ever known. She sounds like random bits and pieces of lots of kids I’ve known, of lots of different ages. Supposedly she’s eight years old but she talks with the unreflective simplicity of a 5-year-old and she still calls the toilet a “potty” like she’s even younger than that. Then, when it’s convenient to the plot, Bela suddenly has the understanding and reactions of a young teenager. She also has no personality beyond being a good dancer and having a demonic imaginary friend. Bela didn’t feel like a real person to me, and since she didn’t feel real I couldn’t care less what happened to her. Without that, nothing about the book is scary or even particularly interesting.
Bela’s parents, who carry forth most of the book’s actual action as they try to get help for Bela, are almost as flat as Bela herself. Daddo is almost pathologically positive and easygoing and Mommy’s only personality traits are being super high strung and cheating on Daddo with anyone she can find. Also, they both drink way too much. Also, their marriage is slowly disintegrating, probably because of all the drinking and cheating. If Bela were an interesting character, I’d be interested in how she deals with these pieces of human wreckage. But I don’t care about her so it’s hard to care how her parents’ poor decisions affect her.
Mommy and Daddo’s emotional issues and relationship build up to a climactic reveal, which comes in the form of a huge monologue dumped on Bela herself, who seems to understand it and react on a teenage level but narrates it with her typical kindergartener flatness. Not to spoil too much, but I was underwhelmed when the big reveal was that (SPOILER ALERT!) Mommy was married before and Daddo is actually Bela’s stepdad. The monologue is very emotional for Mommy bacause it involves even more cheating and drinking than she currently does, but I don’t see an 8-year-old having any idea what to make of this at all. It’s presented in a very adult way in an attempt to “destroy Bela’s innocence” but just knowing a bunch of adult stories doesn’t really do that; part of being an innocent is being too young to get what any of that means even when you are told about it. So the whole reveal felt shoehorned in to bring the parents’ issues to some sort of climax.
If I squint really hard I can see this book trying to be the sensitive study of a troubled marriage and an emotionally neglected child, framed by the haunting story. It didn’t work for me, but I think this is what some people enjoyed about the book. For me, these parts felt too repetitive and underdeveloped to have much impact. This is the real down side of choosing a child as the narrator–we get a lot of faithful reports of conversations Bela overhears, but no real introspection or exploration of, say, why Bela has no friends or why Mommy feels so compelled to explore her dark side to its limits. Without that exploration, this feels more like a hamfisted moral lesson than a deep look at, well, anything. There’s no depth here for me.
The actual entity was pretty well done and suitably creepy, I’ll give it that. Its size and shape are constantly shifting in an unsettling way. it also mimics Bela’s loved ones as it tries to manipulate her into giving up her body; some of those scenes build nicely as some trusted person slips into disturbing territory and you realize this is not who you thought it was. I think some people read Bela and just mentally insert some actually endearing child in her place, and if you can do that I think the horror elements are much more effective.
After I finished this book I looked up reviews, and this seems to be a polarizing book. A whole lot of people where just as bored as I was, but a whole lot of people got deeply invested and started checking their closets for monsters. I do think the cartoonishly flat characters are the key to both reactions: some of us just can’t bring ourselves to care about these people as written and some people are able to replace them in their imaginations with much better characters they actually can care about. Of maybe fans of this book have just never met a child and don’t know any better. Yeah, maybe that’s it.
Darker Books 