Reading Room Radio: Incidents Around the House

It's time to jump into fear...of your own home.

Title: Incidents Around the House

Author: Josh Malerman

Reviewed by: Laura H.

Created by the Podcast Team at the Harris County Public Library.
www.hcpl.net

Podcast Team Members include: Beth Krippel, John Harbaugh, Mary Mink, Dylan Smith, Sadina Shawver, Alinda Mac, John Schaffer, Jennifer Finch, Katelyn Helberg, Darcy Casavant, Darla Pruitt and Nancy Hu 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Paris County Public Library's Reading Room Radio, where you're to be red piled a little more exciting one micropodcast at a time. Hi out there, book fans. My name is Laura. I am the branch manager at the Crosby Library, a lover of all things spooky-ookie, and your host for today's episode. I'm going to talk to you about a novel by Josh Malerman, who is probably most known for his 2014 release, Bird Box. But 10 years later, he released Incidents Around the House, our subject for today, and a chilling horror novel that proves that you don't need a crumbly old mansion on top of a crumbly old cliff to scare readers. A tiny closet, in a child's bedroom, in a normal suburban home can do the job just fine. Now the center stories itself around a young girl named Bella and her family. Seems totally normal from the outside. A mom, a dad, or a daddo, as Bella calls him, and a daughter. But it soon becomes clear to us that something is wrong. You see, Bella has a friend. A friend who lives in her house. A friend she calls Other Mommy. The other mommy isn't imaginary, like you would hope, either. She makes disturbing requests and asks strange questions. One in particular. She asks Bella gently at first, and then almost every night, can I go inside your heart? Mellerman tells the story largely from Bella's perspective. The child's voice, and let me strongly recommend the audio version here, as the narrator does an amazing job and really brought Bella to life and just enhanced the atmosphere tenfold for me. Her voice creates a deeply unsettling feeling that permeates the novel. Bella describes events in simple, innocent language, but we understand the implications in a way that she can't. The gaps between what she says and what we understand is where much of the terror lives. And the novel captures that strange space where children just accept things that adults have learned to reject. Bella doesn't question other mommy the way her parents do. For her, it's just another presence in her little world. And trust me when I say that her innocence makes the horror so much worse. There's no over-the-top gore here, no constant jump scares, just a slow build of dread and the creeping realization that the adults, you know, the ones that children put their trust into to keep them safe, uh, they're losing control if they ever really had any to begin with. Now, without going into too much detail, as that way lies spoilers, especially in a book like this, the escalation in this book is constant, with each scene piling on more tension and more tension. The writing is sharp and the chapters are short. You keep turning pages because it feels like something is going to happen at any moment. And by the time the novel reaches its climax, the emotional stakes are just as high as the supernatural ones. It's not just about surviving a haunting, but about whether this family can survive what happens after. If there is an after at all. In mid-2025, it was announced that a movie adaptation was going to be released under the name Other Mommy, with Jessica Chastain taking on the title role. It's slated to come out in October of this year, and I know I'm not the only one hoping that it is just as tense, claustrophobic, and unsettling on the screen as it is on the page. So if you enjoy psychological horror, unreliable narrators, or stories where the threat is intimate and domestic rather than epic and apocalyptic, then I think this book is absolutely worth your time.