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!

A chilling horror novel about a haunting told from the perspective of a young girl whose troubled family is targeted by an entity she calls “Other Mommy,” from the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box

Very creepy and eerie. I loved it!

This is the third book by Malerman that I’ve read and it’s definitely my favorite. I was going to just read a few pages before bed last night and I ended up reading half of the book. I finished it today. This is a very addictive read and I really enjoyed it.

The story is told from a young girl’s perspective and it did take a little bit to get used to this point of view. The way Malerman wrote this book is really unique and it definitely felt like a child was narrating the story. I think that’s one of the reasons why I flew through this book. I just loved the writing style. The only thing that got on my nerves is the repeated use of the word ‘Daddo,’ which Bela called her father. I think that word is going to haunt my dreams for the next several months.

There were some scary ass moments in this book and I don’t recommend reading it before you go to sleep. You may start having nightmares involving creepy entities that want to possess you. Stories with dark entities freak me out and the ‘other mommy’ was a frightening character.

Overall, I thought this was a chilling and entertaining read. I look forward to reading more from Malerman.

If you’re looking for a spine-tingling read, definitely pick this one up.

4.5⭐️

I absolutely loved this book! The entire time I read it I felt nervous and scared not knowing when Other Mommy would show up, or what the fate of the family would entail. We are thrown right into the situation with Bela, as she narrates what's happening as Other Mommy begins to come out of the closet and follow her outside of just the bedroom. This book moves quickly and unlike many horror tropes, Bela's family believes what's happening so the situation becomes more dire as they try to work together to rid whatever is haunting their daughter. Bela's perspective makes this a unique book because we can feel her fear and how those around her attempt to help. I would absolutely recommend this title to anyone who loves to feel creeped out because this is a book you can't put down.

Prepare to fight sleep, just like the traumatized family in this book. They’re moving from place to place trying to figure out how to protect their daughter. The reader is moving from chapter to chapter, captivated, and compelled to know what will happen.
If you like being a bit scared to get up at night and use the restroom. Because the book was just that terrifyingly good. Which I do. This book is for you.
I was given an early release copy of this title on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Josh Malerman is definitely an author I look forward to reading. Ever since Bird Box, of which I'm sure he's tired of it being mentioned, I knew he was a great storyteller, and that has been proven time and time again with each passing book. It's giving Coraline vibes, and I am ALLLLLL here for an "other mother" like story, I can't get enough.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random-House Publishing for the opportunity to read and review Incidents Around the House. All opinions are my own.

Wow, where to begin. Bela is our main character who is 8 years old. She lives in a house with Mommy, Daddo, and Other Mommy. So yeah, that's odd. Obviously, Mommy and Daddo doesn't know about Other Mommy. Other Mommy wants to possess Bela but needs permission. Here our story unfolds. I don't want to say much to stay away from any spoilers. I'd recommend maybe going into this story blind.

Incidents is a rather short book coming in around 256 pages. Very quick especially considering the style each page is typed for dialogue purposes. Definitely a quick read for me because I really wanted to see how this was going to end. Other characters are introduced throughout the book, some important, and some just passing through. The book is creepy, scary, and thought provoking. Malerman is usually hit or miss with me, but this one is a hit for sure. The only reason I didn't give it a 5 star is the ending. The ending wasn't my favorite, but still a book I would recommend reading to all folks that love a good scary book. If you are a Malerman or horror fan, you should for sure pick this one up. Publication date is June 25th. Happy Reading!

Josh Malerman strikes again! So creepy and spooky! I quite literally don’t think I’ll be able to sleep.