Incidents Around the House

Bela is eight years old, and her whole world is her family: Mommy, Daddo, and Grandma Ruth. It's also Other Mommy—the thing that comes out of the closet and asks Bela the same soft, patient question again and again: can she go inside Bela's heart? For a long time Bela says no. But Other Mommy is growing tired of asking, and the incidents around the house are getting harder to explain away.

Told entirely in the runaway, guileless voice of a child, Josh Malerman's Incidents Around the House wrings dread from innocence, using Bela's limited understanding to make an old-fashioned haunting feel newly, unbearably close. Beneath the supernatural terror runs a real one—a family fracturing under strain—making this both a genuinely frightening ghost story and a portrait of the cracks that run through a home.