I have a feeling that there are going to be two standard responses to 'Incidents Around the House' and mine is the bad one. Some people are going to love it because Malerman took a couple of very specific approaches that they adore. Other people are going to be highly disappointed because he didn't do anything else at all and those very specific approaches do not a good book make. Sadly, I find myself in the latter category, albeit with a couple of important caveats.
The setup is very simple and the story follows suit. Bela is eight years old and she's as innocent as an eight-year-girl ought to be. Her family are pretty much everything to her and there aren't a lot of them. The ones who live with her are Mommy and Daddo, who we soon learn are named Ursula and Russ. Kelvin isn't technically related but he's family to Bela because he's her babysitter when Mommy and Daddo host parties downstairs, which is relatively often. Later, after things escalate, we meet Mommy's mommy, Grandma Ruth.
Oh, but then there's Other Mommy and she's the point of this book. Our job as readers is to figure out who, or indeed what, Other Mommy is.
Other Mommy starts out like the boogeyman. She lives in Bela's closet, from which she frequently emerges to sit on her bed and talk with her and eventually reach her mantra of a question: "Can I go into your heart?" Now, I say boogeyman because that's surely how we see her, from our distant point of view as readers. Bela, being an innocent eight-year-old girl not prone to hysterics sees her more as an imaginary friend. After all, Other Mommy never hurts her. She visits, she talks and she ends up getting to that question, which has something to do with carnations. Flowers are cool.
We, on the other hand, quickly realise that Other Mommy is talking about reincarnation. Clearly she wants Bela's body as a shell that she can use to live again. And, if she gets her way, in the wild and horrific way of, well, politely asking for it, then Bela will go to wherever she is now. Which isn't the closet. I found this combination of boogeyman and imaginary friend promising, but whatever I was waiting for, Malerman wasn't interested in delivering.
So to those two important caveats I mentioned.
One is that I could suggest that Malerman is hit or miss for me and that's certainly true, but it's a problematic simplification. I still haven't read 'Bird Box', his biggest hit, but this is my fifth novel by him and every one of those five has been completely different to the other four, something I'm very appreciative of. Horror doesn't have to be repetitive, but authors often find their voice and end up knocking out a lot of books for which that voice works. Malerman has a lot of voices, which makes him admirably versatile. He keeps us on the hop.
With most other authors, my experience with their first book is likely to mirror the rest, allowing for a range in the individual quality. That's not the case with Malerman. I'll love that one but hate this one and still happily pick up the next, because it's going to be something different again. My favourite thus far is easily 'Unbury Carol', which is an unusual gem of a novel, but 'Inspection' had a lot for me too. I adored the concept behind 'Goblin', even if I feel that the end result didn't come near to its potential, and I appreciated what 'Daphne' did more than I enjoyed it.
The other is that Other Mommy is freaky. The sort of reader who's either new to the genre or in a rut with it and pops onto a Facebook horror book group to ask something like "Tell me what books scared you?" may well find Other Mommy really frickin' freaky to the point where this book makes them put it down for a while and maybe erect a barrier around it so Other Mommy doesn't escape and target them. If you're someone who bought Cassandra Khaw's 'Nothing But Blackened Teeth' for the cover art alone, Other Mommy may well freak you the hell out.
And scare is a loaded word here. I have aphantasia, so can't visualise images, and that may be one reason why books don't scare me. The mood authors that generate can have an effect on me, but I don't read books like people watch movies and that means that there are no jump scares in books for me. I understand other people can visualise images and, if jump scares in books work for them, then this is something they may find highly effective. Other Mommy is memorable and, for a lot of readers, probably very scary indeed.
With all that said, I didn't like this much at all and for a whole slew of reasons.
For one, Malerman tells it entirely from Bela's perspective, which means innocence. However, he does this in an unusual way that didn't work for me, beyond acknowledging the originality.
He alternates what Bela is thinking right now with conversation that's happening in her presence, whether she's part of that conversation or not. What she thinks is left aligned without a first line indent, so a lot of paragraphs blur together. Conversation is indented but otherwise presented in the same way, with no first line indents, no quotation marks and, surprisingly, no identification of who's speaking, with context and a new line for a new speaker having to make do.
What's more, these sections are separated by a blank line and that change happens often enough that there could be ten of those on a page. As the story unfolds in a highly conversational manner, that means a lot of white space and the writer in me wonders what the word count was. It's surely far less than the typical book of this size, making it a very quick read for something that runs over three hundred and fifty pages.
For another, while Other Mommy is inventively freaky, she doesn't really do anything. I get that a family in this situation, who realise that their little girl is seeing things, only to start seeing Other Mommy too, are going to panic. That's fair, but over the amount of time in play, did they not see a particular detail, that Bela's absolutely fine? In fact, while Bela's experienced Other Mommy for a long time, she's arguably in much better shape than everyone else, because she doesn't freak out.
What's more, even when Mommy, Daddo and eventually Grandma Ruth start to see this monster, it does nothing to them except scare them. I ended up equating their experience to going through a professional haunted house. Sure, there are a bunch of people in costumes trying to scare you as best they can but they're not allowed to touch you, so you know, deep down, that the big dude with the chainsaw isn't going to dismember you and you're going to eventually reach the exit safe and sound. It's a thrill, but it's an inherently safe thrill. This book felt like that for me.
Where Malerman could have saved me is in his themes or revelations. Other Mommy's name has certain connotations, none of which are ever explored. Given hints early on, I wondered quickly if she was a metaphor for cheating, the third wheel in a relationship, but that angle goes in a very different direction. Malerman has no interest in explaining where Other Mommy is right now, in fact ruthlessly excising certain potential avenues of exploration. When the police can't help, they go to the church and we start imagining the exorcism scenes, but they're simply turned away. This potential demon isn't a religious matter and so that's that.
At the end of the day, I'm still not sure what Other Mommy is and I don't have a list of possibilities. Like the big dude with the chainsaw in that professional haunted house, she's just there and that's all the matters. She's there and she's scary and, positive note here, she isn't haunting the house. I did like the fact that this family naturally assume that, once shown enough evidence, they should move out and go stay with other people, maybe a long way away. Malerman doesn't allow that quick escape. Other Mommy isn't haunting their house, she's haunting them, so she goes with them.
But, if this is about them, then we need to care about them and I never did. Bela's innocent and so naturally gets our sympathy, but we know very quickly indeed that she's in absolutely no danger at all as long as she says no when Other Mommy asks "Can I go into your heart?" Imagine your horror villain of choice being hamstrung like that. Whatever horror they plan to unleash can only happen if they ask you politely if it's OK and you say yes. Sorry, Freddy, not today. OK, see you tomorrow. It doesn't work for me. So, do we care about the rest of her family? Mommy isn't sympathetic at all, though she has a few moments. Daddo is too sympathetic, too much of a nice guy, so we assume a secret that's much darker for him than the real one ever turns out to be. I did like Grandma Ruth, but that's not enough.
And that brings me to the ending, which I won't spoil, of course, but will say disappointed me most because it's what I thought at the end of page four when Other Mommy asks her question for the first time. Getting to that three hundred and whatever pages later meant that everything that I'd read in between suddenly felt like padding. Would this be a much better ten-page short story? It's very possible. If I think about everything Malerman would have to remove to get to that point, I'm not coming up with anything that I'd miss. And that's not good.
So this is a notable dud to my thinking, but one by an author who continually does new things with each of his novels, so I'm still looking forward to whatever he comes up with next. ~~ Hal C F Astell
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