Incidents Around the House

A child, Bela, starts to see a weird creature around the house — “Other Mommy”. The creature talks to her and keeps asking to enter her heart. Soon, her parents and friends of her parents start seeing the thing, and they set about trying to banish it from the house.

To my shame I don’t know if I have ever read a full on ‘horror’ novel before. Perhaps my imagination is just too bruised and battered to fully get into it but how can something be scary when you are just sat reading a book in a cafe having a bun? I did try reading it under the blankets at midnight with a torch but that didn’t really help either — I did have a bun then too however so perhaps it’s the bun that is making things less frightening.

Anyway all that to say, I don’t really have a good frame of reference on which to peg this book so my opinion is barely worth the paper it is printed on (or the web page it is… typed on?). But I will say this, I liked the sense of place and the way Halerman introduces a constant tension into it.

I didn’t love the prose, where Bela is meant to be eight but reads more like five? The whole book is told first person from her perspective, and typeset slightly oddly which does work to give you some weird little jump scares. Almost as if the way the words are physically rendered on the page serves to hide details from you before they make themselves known.

As an allegory for shitty parenting and the effect it has on the family unit, it’s alright. Looking forward to the movie, where I will try not to bring a bun in.