Here’s the thing…I read a lot of horror, and I can appreciate a well-wrought scary book, but I rarely get scared. Josh Malerman has an impressive back catalog which I’m ashamed to say I’ve only begun to dip into. As usual, my excuse is, too many books, too little time. I called the first Malerman I read, Daphne, a new horror classic. It was heartfelt, with a great main character, and most of all damn scary, even to a jaded horror fan like me.

Now comes Malerman’s new one, Incidents Around the House, and let me tell you, this book is creepy as fuck.

Incidents Around the House takes the trope of the monster in the closet, and he twists it up into a razor-sharp dagger that digs into the base of your skull. For a young girl named Bela, that monster is an entity named Other Mommy, who with one simple, seductive question—”Can I go inside your heart?”—it turns Bela’s world upside down. And not just Bela’s, because Other Mommy is soon too restless, and too powerful, to stay in the closet. What follows is a breathless, deadly race for survival against a malevolent, insidious monster.

If that was all Incidents Around the House was, it would be enough—it would be a crackerjack horror novel. But Malerman has more in mind. The entire novel is told from Bela’s point of view, and the voice Malerman gives her—true to her age but insightful, terrified but impossibly brave, worried for her parents and grandma but with enough love in her heart to want to protect them at all costs, even if it puts her in incredible danger—is a master class in authentic voice and sustained tension.

I think people are going to be talking about Incidents Around the House at awards season, and for years to come.

Incidents Around the House publishes on June 25, 2024, and is available for pre-order now.