Totally creepy and terrifying, I was glued to this book in the beginning. But somehow it took a downward turn and the ending fell flat leaving me disappointed. I seem to be in the minority so I won't discourage anyone from reading it. But I would advise against reading it at night unless you enjoy nightmares. My thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

Sooo creepy I actually couldn’t really read at night and not many thing scare me! I also really liked this read even tho it was from a child’s pov, it was done well! I think malerman is quickly becoming an auto read!

I’ve had a rocky relationship with Josh Malerman. Incidents Around the House is told from the perspective of eight year old Bela. There is an entity living in Bela’s closet that likes to be called “Other Mommy”. Every day it asks Bela a question and every time Bela tells it no, Other Mommy grows bolder. It begins leaving the house with Bela and showing itself to other people. Bela and her family try to figure out how to make Other Mommy go away, but their lives may be ripped apart before they can. Malerman has finally written another story that I like. This is a creepy, disquieting book. I felt a bit sick with worry over Bela and her family. The way it is written, from the eyes of a child, make it that much more unsettling. It is filled with dread, and fear for what seems may be an inevitable conclusion. This is a creative haunting tale, and for me, a redemption story for Malerman. 4/5 stars. Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for allowing me access to an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Publication date June 25th, 2024. This review will be found on Instagram and Goodreads indefinitely.
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This was okay, but not scary at all to me. There were some creepy moments - monsters in the closet-type stuff - but on the whole, there were some weird and long dialog blocks that would never be spoken to an 8-year-old and were also sort of boring and long-winded. The couple bursts of monster moments didn't really feel emotionally heightened enough to make me feel really creeped out. I found myself more confused at the end than anything. Maybe if the book were from the perspective of someone older, I would have felt more connected to it and disturbed? I could actually see this being scarier as a film in a Babadook sense because all the long, dragging personal talks could be woven more into the action than in the book. Also, the insistence on "daddo" as a constant reference to Bela's dad really annoyed me! And Ursula sucked.

Creepy & Unsettling. And, believe it or not, heartbreaking.
It's one thing to live in a haunted house. But it's a whole other level of freak-out when the haunting follows you...

I have been desperate to find a horror novel that would have a physical affect on me and I have finally found it!
This is one you want to read with the lights on and all the doors open! Especially the closet 😆

This novel is written entirely from the perspective of an 8 year old so it took a while to find my reading groove. But after you get past the oddness of not having quotation marks and a clear distinction of a conversation layout you quickly forget that you're reading a story. It almost feels like you are listening to a child recount events as though she were sitting on a couch in a therapist's office.
And after full submission into her story, it's quite heartbreaking in the end to imagine what she must have been feeling, the sheer terror she endured, and the decision she struggled with.

This book is quite different from any I've ever read, in many ways, and I couldn't be happier.

Huge thanks to Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Maleman's best yet. A tale of a young girl's invisible friend, who isn't invisible and who definitely isn't her friend. Tense, relentless, and fully terrifying, Malerman has given us his best book thus far. I'll be recommending this to my staff and customers and plan on putting a big display up front.

The best horror novel I've read this year. Just stunning.

Thanks NetGalley for the e-arc of this book!

The concept of this book was really nothing new, but the young narrator was a really nice touch and probably added a star, although as many other reviews are stating Bela did come across as MUCH younger than 8. I think anyone that has any kind of experience with kids would be occasionally taken out of the story by that.

I loved that there were descriptions of the monster and that other people saw it too, I think that’s definitely unique to the haunted house/haunted family trope. In the end, it was just okay and a pretty quick and easy read, I just wish it hadn’t gone around in circles and repeated so much. And you could see the end coming from a mile away.

Look, the way I RAN to apply for this ARC after seeing the author of Bird Box wrote a horror novel about a crazy entity called “Other Mommy”. Fun fact I’m scared of the dark so this book was tough to read alone at night in some spots. I feel like I liked where this book was heading and the ending was kind of a letdown. I also would love to read a book similar to this without being from the 8 year old’s perspective, it was interesting to say the least. My biggest gripe would be the lack of use of quotation marks. As there is a lot of internal dialogue as well and when you have multiple characters talking and the internal dialogue it could get pretty messy.

I thought Bird Box was such a good book, so I was super excited to read Incidents Around the House. Even the title is great. The story was scary! A few times I was alone in the house reading at night and I felt a little anxious about looking up at the dark corners of the closet. This author is really good at setting up a story and then leaving just enough mystery/explanation as to what is happening. The family in the story is completely freaked out and at a loss for what is going on. They don't know how to stop this malevolent entity and they don't know what it is. It makes it seem so much more real when that confusion and fear is with the reader too. I hope this author keeps on writing! I definitely recommend this book. I received an e-book from the publisher is exchange for an honest review.

[Snack Size Review] Incidents Around The House, by Josh Malerman

Quick Bite: I am not OK right now.

(*I voluntarily read and reviewed an advance copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.*)

What It’s About: Eight year old Bela is being haunted. She calls the terrifying entity Other Mommy. Other Mommy is her only friend, but she keeps asking Bela one question: Can I come into your heart? Bela is afraid of what will happen if she agrees to trade places with Other Mommy, but with her home life becoming less stable, it’s starting to sound like maybe not too bad of an idea.

A Word From The Nerd: Ohhhhhh my beloved nerdlings. I devoured this book in 24 hours, and my emotions are all over the place right now. At times, Bela’s narration (and lack of punctuation) can be grating, and for crying out loud, why do people in horror novels never just TALK to each other? So many times, it would solve so many problems, but noooooooo. They all just keep mucking around, misunderstanding and making things so much worse. But at the same time, this is a hell of a ride. Other Mommy is flat-out terrifying, and I genuinely cared so much for the characters.

The Nerd’s Rating: FOUR HAPPY NEURONS (and a nap under a giant beach umbrella, it sounds wonderfully refreshing right now.)

One of the best horror books I have ever read. Gave me nightmares! Bela is a little girl who makes a friend that happens to live in her closet. But this friend wants something from her...and Bela doesn't know if she should give it.
Interestingly told through a child's point-of-view, who doesn't understand why adults are afraid of "Other Mommy", Bela's friend. Very well written, and almost poetic at times.
A new favorite.

You can read this with all the lights on. You can read this at the beach. In a park, in the sunshine, and it’s still going to make your skin crawl. Horrifying, creepy, heartbreaking and truly, deeply scary, this is one of the best horror novels that I remember ever reading. If they say that you should write about what you know, Malerman must be an eight year old girl, because his voice is so convincing, so real. This is the story of Bela’s haunting by an entity that lives in her closet. She calls her “Other Mommy” and all she wants is for Bela to let her into her heart. Exorcists, mediums and ghost hunters can’t help. It’s all up to Bela’s real Mommy, her Daddo and her grandma, and this is the story of what they have to do to fight this evil. I loved all the characters. Bela is innocent and adorable. Her parents are flawed, but they love her. And Other Mommy is unspeakably terrifying. The plot is unbearably suspenseful. A five star read. Malerman is amazing.
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, NetGalley/Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine | Del Rey.

This was a great book, and the pages flew by. It's told from the first person perspective of a child, and that really added to the intrigue and the revealing of what was actually happening. A really good book, really interestingly written, and hard to put down. Highly recommended!

Incidents Around the House
Josh Malerman

<i>To eight-year-old Bela, her family is her world. There’s Mommy, Daddo, and Grandma Ruth. But there is also Other Mommy, a malevolent entity who asks her every day: “Can I go inside your heart?”</i>

I am a fan of Bird Box and Josh Malerman, and have been looking forward to this, his new novel. A malevolent Other Mommy that lives in your closet… how can I resist?

The story hits the ground running and keeps on running. Once you start reading this book, it is as hard to put down as it is difficult to get up in the middle of the night to hit the head. There is a gradual build up of a creeping dread and sense of horror. Truly a scary book, and I don’t scare too easily. Like some other reviewer mentioned, I hope this too gets a movie adaptation.

My appreciation to NetGalley and to the author/publisher for providing an ARC for review. This is an original, unbiased, independent review.

Holy creepy vibes, book peeps!! 🫣 At one point I found myself squirming in my seat, pulling my legs up to try to make myself small!! 😅 I also might have teared up a little during the last quarter of the book…🥺

Highly recommend this one!!! ❤️ Just beware you may get the heebies jeebies while reading it!!

Thank you to NetGalley, Random House, and Josh Malerman for the opportunity to read the eARC in exchange for my honest review!!

Josh’s novella collection, Spin A Black Yarn, was one of my favorite books of last year. I read it in two days. I talk about it enough that my wife has told me to stop.

I didn’t know what I was getting into when I got the Netgalley approval. It took me to some places—not the places I wanted to go—and scared the hell out of me. I would have read it in a day, but I needed breaks from the seriously freaky things happening.

I have been afraid of closets since I was a kid. I don’t know why, and I can never put it into words. My wife doesn’t get it. I don’t like them. If you’re like me, this book is for you. If you’re not, then it’s still the book for you.

It opens with a little girl, Bella. Her parents are having issues. They have parties all the time, and something is haunting her. The Other Mommy is not like the one from Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. It’s a terrifying descent into a family dealing with something traumatic happening to their kid as they deal with their lives.

Josh is very good at traumatic experiences. He writes Bella so well. We watch her struggle through the fear of Other Mommy, not knowing when she’ll pop up or be at the end of the bed. This is a story that would do well as a screenplay.

I set the book down numerous times because of what was happening—the story's imagery. The description of Other Mommy is something out of my childhood nightmares. I knew something would come out of the closet. I felt it as a kid.

Josh captures a child's fear in this story: the fear of the Other Mommy, what’s going on with her parents, and not knowing how to make the Other Mommy go away.

It’s been a while since I felt a child’s fear in a story. Josh does it easily in this story.

The ending and the lead-up to the ending were unexpected but worked well for the story. I’ll be purchasing this when it is released next month.

This book tore me out of my recent reading slump like a blaring iPhone alarm waking you up when you realize you hit snooze and you’re late for work. The pacing was excellent, and the format helped moved the story along nicely. The voice from the perspective of a kid is always a tough one to make feel truly authentic, but Malerman nailed it here. This book will creep you out and make your imagination run amok. You’ll both want to know what’s going on with “Other Mommy” — and be too scared to find out. If you have a kid, this will upend those moments at bedtime where you lay next to them, the shadows playing games on the wall as the closet door sits open a crack.

Unfortunately this was a DNF for me. I'll still be recommending for some of my patrons. However, I failed to get passed the first two chapters. The mother's conversation with her child made me see red.

The parenting and relationships in this book are scarier than Other Mommy.

So many things happen/are said in this book in passing, and around the kid, that are completely inappropriate, and go totally unchallenged by any of the characters. I kept wondering if this was intentional to make us view the adults as bad people, or if the author is just that out of touch with healthy parent/child interactions. In any case, it was icky.

On a different note, I was hooked from the first few pages, but quickly grew bored. The story stagnates from 30% forward. Instead of escalating horror, you get repetition. The same idea was repeated over and over until it totally lost whatever sense of scariness and fun it originally carried.

Telling the story from the perspective of a young child was a difficult task to pull off, and it showed. To inject adult thoughts into the story, the author resorted to an odd tactic by which the parents would speak their thoughts out loud to the child as she pretended to sleep. This setup felt overly contrived and I hated it.

A horror story told in a child’s first person POV, “Incidents Around the House” is about Bela and her nighttime closet-dwelling friend, “Other Mommy.” Bela is school-aged and Other Mommy has seemingly always been benignly around but now she’s out of the closet, venturing into more rooms in the house. With Other Mommy becoming more persistent and malevolent, Bela’s parents are getting subtle clues that something is off: movement just outside their peripheral field of vision; strange whiffs of ugly smells; a drunk party guest who sees a tall blue monster. Plus Other Mommy wants to go into Bela’s “heart,” which Bela instinctively knows is a bad thing. It does not help that Mommy and Daddo are obviously in a tense relationship, something that Bela senses.

Reading a story via a child’s point of view takes some getting used to, but the implied innocence and confusion of Bela adds to this psychological thriller. Her parents’ introspective out-loud dialogues (when they think Bela is asleep) gives us a sense of the adults’ mindsets, too. There are no quotation marks to denote who is speaking or when their part has ended (beyond a new indented sentence) and that did cause me to re-read past sentences a lot more than I wanted — I envisioned eventually this more like a screenplay. Yet, the tension steadily builds as the family starts to believe that Other Mommy is real and they start to crumble. What does a family do when they believe an “entity” is stalking their daughter? This definitely was a page-turner and a disturbing one at that. Author Malerman delivers a horror story that will keep you up T night. 4 stars.

Literary Pet Peeve Checklist:
Green Eyes (only 2% of the real world, yet it seems like 90% of all fictional females): YES Although it’s a snake with bright green eyes.
Horticultural Faux Pas (plants out of season or growing zones, like daffodils in autumn or bougainvillea in Alaska): NO All the talk of “carnations” isn’t about flowers…

Thank you to Ballantine/Del Ray and NetGalley for a free advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review!