Incidents Around the House
Incidents Around the House
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Josh Malerman on Incidents Around the House
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A child’s goodnight that wouldn’t let goThe book began not as a plot but as a moment Malerman couldn’t unfasten from his mind. His younger brother Ryan and Ryan’s wife were tucking their son Elliott in for the night when Elliott said goodnight a second time, in a slightly different register, and told them he was saying goodnight to Other Mommy. Malerman held that moment for 13 years before writing a single word of the novel. What broke the logjam was grief: after he and his partner Allison lost their cat, Allison began painting a mural of the animal directly on the foyer wall. Watching her write on the walls moved him to his own office, where he wrote the book’s outline on the wall above his computer. He noticed only afterward that the outline was sitting directly above the office closet.
I’ve had the idea for some 13 years. My brother told me a story similar to the first chapter, about him and his wife putting their kid to bed for the night and the kid saying goodnight to ‘Other Mommy.’ The little story stuck in a big way and finally, recently, I wrote the outline on the office wall. Then went for it.
How he wrote it
One structural rule, then silenceBefore writing a scene, Malerman settled the book’s governing structural rule on the wall beside the outline. The question was whether an eight-year-old narrator could carry an entire novel without once being unreliable, and the answer shaped every decision that followed. The adults in the book encounter Other Mommy almost immediately, so no one spends pages doubting the child. Credibility is granted from the start.
Bella is not unreliable. She’s not, this is not imaginary. No, it’s not a question of people believing her. Bella is true. [paraphrased from audio]
Granting Bela that credibility required a technical solution at the sentence level. Malerman’s choice of present tense was not atmospheric preference but a logical fix for a specific narrative problem: how an eight-year-old could plausibly relay adult conversation word for word without the seams showing.
I think that the key to not cheating her narration was that it was present tense. Because if it was past tense for her to repeat everything Daddo and Mommy said, you’d be like, how does she remember it all? But present tense, we don’t even know how much of this is sinking in, but she’s just hearing it. And so are we.
The second structural rule on the wall concerned the parents. Malerman had decided early that helplessness would not be a phase the adults move through on the way to a solution. It would be the permanent condition of the book.
It was like a pillar of this book that Mommy and Daddyo can’t help. The church can’t help. Like religion can’t help. Ghost Hunter can’t help. The occultist friend, acquaintance grandma. Nobody can help. [paraphrased from audio]
Malerman normally writes to horror movie soundtracks, a record player running in his office throughout a draft. For this book, every record he tried failed the mood, and the failure led him somewhere he had never been before.
I tried like a number of like soundtracks and one was too sweeping and one was too grandiose and one was too dramatic and one was too scary and one was it just, nothing, I couldn’t find the mood. So finally, I was like, ‘Hey, man, have you ever tried just writing a book to silence?’
He sat in his office with only the screen lit, the house dark and quiet around him, and felt what he describes as a cold wind moving through the draft. He decided not to disturb it.
When he compares the atmospheric register of this book to that of Bird Box, his 2014 debut novel about creatures whose sight kills anyone who looks at them, the distinction he reaches for is musical rather than visual. The difference is not in stakes or pacing but in the quality of the dread moving through the prose.
Bird Box has almost a single note through it all, a single hum that you could, the same note could go through every chapter. This one, it’s almost like the same gust of wind can go through every chapter.
What he wants us to sit with
An entity at the glass, and no one coming to helpAsked to distill the book to five words, Malerman reached for the same image he had been working toward in his empty, silent office: not a plot summary but a physical sensation.
A cold wind, no music.
When he describes what he wants readers to feel as they move through Bela’s account, the framing is entirely optical. The reader is not inside the threat; they are pressed close to the glass, watching it work.
I hope they feel they are looking through a magnifying glass, watching closely an entity’s attempt to get in.
The book’s reception split in a way Malerman found telling. It became his best-received novel by reader response and sales numbers, and the first of his books rejected by his regular UK publisher, who found it too dark. The darkness, he was careful to note, is not about graphic violence but about something harder to quantify.
In a strange way this book is like, the man isn’t into it, but the people are.
He clarified that the publisher’s objection was to the atmosphere rather than to any specific content: the book’s darkness is a quality of mood that some gatekeepers find intractable and that readers, apparently, find irresistible.