55 pages • 1 hour read
Incidents Around the House
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Background
Authorial Context: Josh Malerman
Josh Malerman is well known for his inventive and atmospheric horror novels, including Daphne, Bird Box, and Unbury Carol. He has won a World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Award and is a best-selling author. He first rose to fame with his debut novel Bird Box, which follows a woman named Malorie who attempts to help her children survive a post-apocalyptic world plagued by creatures who cause anyone who sees them to become violent. Bird Box was praised for its creative premise as well as its focus on Malorie’s struggles as a mother. Malerman’s work often focuses on relationships and the domestic as a setting for horror. Incidents Around the House explores this domestic setting, using an ordinary suburban home as the backdrop for a frightening tale of possession and danger.
Malerman worked as a professional musician for many years, touring as the singer and songwriter of the Detroit rock band The High Strung. He wrote 14 rough drafts while making a living as a touring musician. He says of that time, “I never saw the books with dollar signs in my eyes. It was no hobby, that’s for sure, it was the real thing and always has been, but I was happy, then, simply writing” (“About Josh Malerman.” Josh Malerman). Eventually, a friend from high school who worked in the publishing business helped him find representation, and Malerman has pursued writing and music in tandem ever since.
Genre Context: Horror
Incidents Around the House draws on many established tropes from the horror genre. One such trope is the use of hauntings to represent familial fracturing and trauma. In Malerman’s novel, Other Mommy is an external, supernatural threat that reveals Russ & Ursula’s dysfunctional relationship and flawed parenting, which places pressure on Bela. This dynamic is common in horror literature, including Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where the decay of the house is an outward representation of the Usher family’s internal corruption. Similarly, Shirley Jackson’s psychological horror novel The Haunting of Hill House uses the haunted house setting to reveal Eleanor Vance’s fragile psyche and her familial problems.
Malerman also uses his young and naive narrator, Bela, to heighten tension and play on readers’ anxieties. The use of a child narrator or protagonist is a common method in horror fiction for creating urgency in readers. The vulnerability and perceived innocence of children raises the plot stakes. For example, Stephen King’s novel The Shining follows the young protagonist Danny Torrance as he tries to survive in the ominous and corrupt atmosphere of the Overlook Hotel. In Incidents Around the House, Malerman uses Bela’s naive point of view to highlight her parents’ harmful behaviors and unhappy marriage. Readers are attuned to things Bela is not and are able to see the cracks in Russ and Ursula’s marriage before Bela does. This insight relates to the novel’s themes of The Resurfacing of Hidden Trauma and Coming to Terms with the Fallibility of Adults. The acclaimed author Henry James uses a similarly naive narrator in his story “What Maisie Knew.” While not a traditional work of horror (unlike his novella The Turn of the Screw, which is a haunted house story), this story uses Maisie’s naïve perspective to show the corruption and neglect of the adults around her. Malerman combines these ideas with more traditional horror tropes (the malevolent entity) to offer a commentary on the domestic as a place of terror.
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