The Emptiness of Incidents Around the House

Contains some spoilers for Incidents Around the House | TW: Abuse and neglect of children

Incidents Around the House is scary straight from the first page. Eight-year-old Bela’s parents tuck into bed for the night, and as soon as they leave her room, Other Mommy emerges from the closet. “Hi,” Bela says. “I’m so excited to see you again.”

That feeling won’t last long. Soon, Other Mommy begins to worry Bela—and roam more freely throughout the house. Then the playground. Then everywhere, no matter where Bela’s family runs. Other Mommy always asks the same question, first gently and later with growing insistence: “Can I go into your heart?”

The novel was well-received by horror readers, who flooded TikTok and Reddit with posts about the novel’s original and unnerving imagery. It was praised by critics, too, including Talking Scared host Neil McRobert, who named it one of 2024’s best horror books in a list for Esquire. “Simply put—and I do not say this lightly—Incidents Around the House is the most purely effective horror novel I have ever read,” McRobert wrote. It’s why I picked up the book last fall, curious to see if it would leave me rattled.

I agree with McRobert. Incidents is an ingeniously effective horror novel that’s haunted by a unique and terrifying entity.

But amid all the conversation, I found myself wishing that someone with a little more in common with Bela would speak up.

When you experience abuse and neglect in early childhood, you might develop certain skills.

You learn glide silently around the house, avoiding the squeaky floorboards and stairs. You can turn doorknobs gently, ease doors open or shut so they don’t thud in the frame. You decode every footstep, reading the weather of your parents’ moods as they move through the house like volatile gods.

You learn to be berated gracefully, unfocusing your eyes and letting the sound wash over you like distant, impersonal rainfall. You learn to remember complex, shifting rules that change as quickly as you can master them. When the garage door squeals open, you know precisely how many seconds you have to conceal whatever unguarded thing you may have been doing. You come up with new ways to stage yourself, deploying subtle and elaborate defense mechanisms designed to minimize criticism. I did, anyway. Maybe you did, too.

You are the ghost in your house, but your parents are the scary ones.

Bela is eight, but to me, she read much younger. She’s excited to see her high-school babysitter, Kelvin, without feeling resentful of the supervision. She calls her parents “Mommy” and “Daddo.” She asks where recycling goes, and, oddly, if it’s a better place, as though waste management is not a major topic of kindergarten picture books.  

I listened to McRobert’s excellent Talking Scared interview with Malerman and it illuminated some of my hunches. Such as: Malerman originally wrote Bela as a five-year-old. But more importantly, it was fascinating to hear the author’s own read on the family’s fractured dynamic.

“When I think of Incidents Around the House, the first thing I think about is Daddo,” Malerman says. “The second thing I think about is Mommy. And then Bela and Other Mommy.”

To Malerman, Daddo is a good friend and an admirably relaxed character. Daddo accepts his wife’s infidelity; he seems prepared to forgive her at any time. As for Mommy, Malerman wonders if her shortcomings are really so terrible, in the end.

I found this perspective fascinating, because mine is so dramatically different. That’s the beautiful thing about art, isn’t it? That readers can bring their life experiences to the same story, and come away with wildly different interpretations, one just as right as the other.

I did prioritize Bela in my reading of this novel, the same way I was attuned to the children in Amityville being beaten and slapped by their parents. I found myself unintentionally tracking Bela’s needs throughout the book. She’s never bathed; she’s rarely dressed in clean clothes or pajamas. Her parents seem to feed her inconsistently. In one of the scenes that bothered me most, Mommy and Daddo drink so much they pass out, leaving Bela with no one to help her find the bathroom in an unfamiliar house at night.

Daddo’s permissive, go-with-the-flow attitude might be fine for his marriage, but his extreme lack of boundaries erodes his ability to create a stable environment for Bela. When the possession threat really heats up, Mommy disappears altogether, fleeing to her lover’s home and leaving her young daughter to fend for herself. As an intentionally childless thirtysomething, I found Mommy’s ambivalence about motherhood deeply relatable. But it also made me reflect on my own childhood, and the moments when my parents explicitly or subtly let me know that I was a burden to them. It’s hard not to feel defensive of Bela, knowing how deeply that sense of inadequacy can worm into your heart.

There is one dynamic that I felt Malerman got exactly right (or at least true to my experience of growing up with weird family dynamics). As Mommy and Daddo stress and scramble, trying to rescue their family from Other Mommy’s torment, Bela is preoccupied with protecting her parents. She knows what Other Mommy is asking of her, and that her parents might be hurt if she doesn’t acquiesce. Bela is scared, of Other Mommy’s dark, hairy arms and her eyes on the bottom of her face and the way she glides across the floor and bunches on the ceiling. But she also feels the heavy weight of responsibility on her little shoulders. Can she make her dysfunctional, unstable family safe? Is that a choice that’s in her power?

If I could make one change to Incidents, I’d give Bela a scene that was just for her—without her parents, or their fair-weather friends, or Other Mommy. I’d let Bela stand on the lawn and feel the grass exhale coldness against her ankles, or let the Michigan lake lap against her shins. I’d let her stare up at the moon and imagine that someone, somewhere is looking up at that same moon, and someday they will give her all the love she’s ever needed and then some. I’d let Bela hear the low, furious whisper of survival. “Just hang on,” that voice—her own voice—would urge. “Someday, all of this will be behind you. Someday you’ll be free.”

Thank You for Joining Me!

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Next week, we’ll be back with another installment of my series on Stephen King’s It. If you missed the first one, you can catch up here!

Scare Me! illustrations by Sam Pugh