My review for Incidents Around The House by Josh Malerman #book #books #bookish #reading #fantasy #scifi #BookRecommendations #horror #review #bookreview #ghost #ghosts #demon #scary

I just finished incidents around the house. Let's talk about it. This book grabbed me. This book got me good. I read all 350 pages in two sittings yesterday, which is amateur-hour to some of you nerds, but for Jeff, that's pretty good. It took me seven months to read memories of ice. I was really excited about this book when I was reading it. And when I was finished, I was kind of confused, but I still felt good about it. And after having sat with the entirety of what incidents around the house is for a day or so at this point, I think I like it less than I thought I did. This could be a combination of not liking the ending, or it just not being what I thought it would be. But I know this book was just published this year, so let's talk about it, spoiler-free edition. Incidents around the house follows the haunting of eight-year-old Bella by an entity that lives in her closet. And Bella refers to this entity as other mommy. Up to the start of this book, other mommy has been around for a while, and so far has mostly been benign, talking to Bella at night, appearing in different places around her room, but always posing one big question to Bella. Can I enter your heart? The realization here being that other mommy would become Bella, and Bella would go wherever other mommy is from, wherever the hell that is. This book starts off pretty fast. There are some incidents around the house, and before long, other mommy is ranging outside of Bella's closet, then outside of Bella's room, then outside of Bella's house. All leading up to one family's frantic attempts to rid themselves of other mommy, and all of the other dramatics that ensue with haunted children. At its core, like most paranormal supernatural horror stories, incidents is not about entities, it's about Bella, her parents, and the relationships between Bella, her parents, and their parents' marriage. Over the course of the story, we learn a lot about her parents, and this leads to a lot of the dramatic tension in the story. What I liked about this book is that it moves very fast. We almost immediately jump into some spooky stuff, and once it pops off, we hit the ground racing. It was engaging, and I was flipping the hell out of those pages, and experiencing all of this through the eight-year-old eyes of Bella was very interesting. Normally, children are collateral damage in stories like this, but Bella is very present. Her opinion is often considered, and experiencing unimaginable fear, and an odd amount of stoicism through the lens of a child was very cool. What I didn't like about this book is that Bella kind of sucks. In fact, pretty much everybody in this book sucks. Bella's internal monologue flip flops between some remarkably eloquent introspection, and her having the processing capacity of a door knob. Kids are frustrating enough on a normal day, but having so much of Bella's responses to everything beep, I don't know, is just not good reading. That might be pretty accurate to how a lot of kids are. I don't know, I'm a dink, but accurate or not, it kind of sucks. Both of Bella's parents are really annoying. Her mom is kind of a complete bitch, and her dad is one of those incredibly optimistic. Everything will be okay, doormats of a husband, so you can imagine that all of their interactions are basically them bickering. There are some tertiary characters, a grandma, a friendly, but helpful psychic, a ghostbuster type dude, and some very cool dogs. But for the most part, all of the characters felt relatively hollow. They have some lines, none of them say or do anything profound, rinse, repeat. The engaging part of this book comes from the suspense of not knowing what kind of spooky nonsense is going to happen next, and not really any of the character drama. I was a bit disappointed in the ending as well, but I imagine that there are a lot of you who will enjoy it. Horror is one of my favorite genres, so I can tend to be a bit overly critical. So take everything I say with a grain of salt. Overall, incidents is a fun and engaging ride, and I'm sure a lot of you will like it much more than I did. I don't think it's bad. I think just what it actually promises versus what it actually delivers is underwhelming. So with that, I give it three out of five hammers.