Let Them Fight: Incidents Around the House
To Daddo or to Daddon't? That is... well, it's certainly *a* question.
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Welcome back to Let Them Fight, a recurring feature where we have a civil, measured, text-based cage match about a work of art we disagree on. This time, Anna and Emily debate narrative POV, childhood nightmares, and the nickname “Daddo” in Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House (2024).
Incidents Around the House is on the brink of reaching a much larger audience: director Rob Savage’s forthcoming adaptation, Other Mommy, hits theaters this October, and the trailer is currently scaring the pants off unsuspecting moviegoers who thought they were sitting down for a normal screening of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. So what better time to for us to revisit Malerman’s source text?
Trailer for Other Mommy, the film based on Incidents Around the House
Fair warning: spoilers follow for Incidents Around the House (and, probably, Other Mommy).
Emily: Okay, right up front: I do not like this book. I didn’t like it when I read it in 2024, and I didn’t like it when I re-read it this past week. I have been continually baffled by people’s claims that it’s the scariest book they’ve ever read. And I say this as a Josh Malerman fan! Bird Box rearranged my neural pathways when I first read it.
It’d be one thing if Incidents Around the House merely left me cold, but instead I find it actively offputting. We’ll dig further into the why as this conversation goes on, but the big insurmountable issue for me is that the entire book is written from the point of view (POV) of, and in the voice of, an eight year-old girl. So, Anna, I know you like Incidents very much (and please do tell us why!), but my big question: Is the Bela POV something you actively enjoy, or do you like the book in spite of it?
Anna: Okay, I read this as an ARC (advanced reader copy) back in 2024, and it was maybe only the second or third Malerman that I had read? His previous book, Daphne, had a chapter that rattled me to my core that talked about anxiety and not knowing what to do with yourself when you realize how big the world is. That being said, I was a Malerman fan going into Incidents which certainly helped. But I was genuinely afraid when I read it! I did read it late at night, and I also read it during a whole week where my now-husband had the flu. It was just me and my dog, staring down the guest room closet where, theoretically, Other Mommy could get me (I was staying in there so as to not get said flu). I remember the reading experience so vividly for those reasons, and I wonder if that had something to do with it.
