Literature / Incidents Around The House

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Incidents Around the House is a 2024 horror novella by Josh Malerman. It follows eight-year-old Bela, who is terrorized by an Entity calling itself "Other Mommy," intent on taking over her body to reincarnate as a young girl. Her parents, Ursula and Russ, try to fight Other Mommy, but are woefully unprepared to face the eldritch horror.

The book uses a non-traditional narrative style, presented as a child's point-of-view monologue with atypical formatting — lacking regular paragraph breaks (only shifting when Bela's thoughts change) and rendering dialogue without punctuation or speaker tags, rather than enclosing it in quotation marks.

A film adaptation, titled Other Mommy, is set for release in 2026, starring Jessica Chastain as Bela's mother Ursula, Jay Duplass as her father Russ, Arabella Olivia Clark as Bela, and Hayley Spelman as Other Mommy.

Incidents Around the House provides examples of:

• Abusive Parents: Of the neglectful kind. Bela's parents, especially her mother, don't really pay attention to her, and sometimes outright wish they wouldn't have had her. This bites them in the butt several times when they are busy with each other while Bela tries to tell them Other Mommy is in the house. They also regularly get drunk and subject Bela to grown-up talks she doesn't quite understand.
• Adults Are Useless: Subverted. Once they find out that Other Mommy is real, Bela's family tries everything to help her, but to no avail.
• All Take and No Give: Other Mommy claims Bela needs to give her her heart, since they are friends, and friends do give each other things.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Played with. Other Mommy kills Bela's entire family and possesses her in the end, but it's pyrrhic at best as she's completely alone and isolated.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: One of the people who tries to help Bela instead gives her a message by Other Mommy and blows out all the candles of their ritual, effectually ending what, even if it didn't work as intended, was a line of communication with Other Mommy.
• Break the Cutie: Other Mommy tries to wear down Bela by psychological tormenting her until she says yes to her question of being allowed to go into her heart.
• Children Are Innocent:
  • What Lois Anthony suspects is why Other Mommy is attracted to Bela.
  • Other Mommy actually holds her hands over Bela's ears when her parents' TV is too loud, and she can hear violence in movies when she is supposed to sleep.
  • Averted when Other Mommy pretends to be Ursula and tells Bela about her constant cheating.
• Cluster F-Bomb: When the paranormal investigator leaves, Ursula yells at him to "fuck you, you fucking fuck".
• Covers Always Lie: There is no haunted house, and Bela doesn't have a toy bunny.
• Daddy's Girl: Since Russ works from home, and Bela doesn't have any friends, they spend most of their time together. Coupled with the fact that Ursula regrets having Bela, and therefore pulling back from her, she becomes close with Russ.
• A Deadly Affair: Other Mommy kills Ursula's affair partner as a gift to Bela.
• Disappeared Dad: Bela's biological father left Ursula when he discovered the affair with Russ.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Bela's family trying to figure out what Other Mommy is and what she wants from Bela reminds readers of the way parents would ask their child if they suspect somebody sexually abused them, especially when Russ wants to know if Other Mommy ever touched Bela.
  • Other Mommy first being overtly nice to Bela, then threatening, then making her a gift is an actual grooming tactic of predators and abusers.
• Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: Before Russ learns that Other Mommy is real, he playfully tells her to go away forever. Instead, the closet door opens repeatedly, as if to warn him.
• Downer Ending: For everybody involved. After Other Mommy killed her family, Bela finally says yes to the switch and lets Other Mommy inside her heart. Bela goes to the place Other Mommy came from, and Other Mommy gets to take over Bela's life, which is left in shambles after the death of her family and the alienation of their friends due to Other Mommy scaring them away.
• Eldritch Abomination: Other Mommy has blue hair, her eyes can be positioned all over her head, she is covered in dark body hair, and is so big she needs to bent to stand in any room. She can also slither across the floor like a snake, flatten herself in tiny crevices, and shape-shift into various people or objects. Her feet consist of three long toes.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: Other Mommy kills Ursula, Russ, and Ruth, leaving Bela all alone with herself.
• Evil All Along: Other Mommy first introduces herself to Bela as her friend, taking care of her, playing games and trying not to scare her. After years of Bela saying no to her request of going inside her heart, Other Mommy starts to torment the whole family.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: Ruth's dog detects Other Mommy in her house. Later, Ursula and Russ rent two guard dogs, who also immediately tell them where Other Mommy is.
• Evil Smells Bad: Other Mommy smells like sewer. When Russ smells her for the first time, he thinks Bela just destroyed the toilet with a stomach bug.
• Growing Up Sucks: Part of trying to get rid of Other Mommy is Ursula destroying Bela's innocence and childhood by telling her how she was married before and cheated on her husband constantly, and that Russ isn't her biological father. Bela is so traumatized by this that she tells the adults Other Mommy is gone, when she is in fact still around.
• Haunted House: Defied, despite initial thoughts of hauntings. Other Mommy freely goes wherever Bela goes, and isn't bound to the house. The title of the book revolves around Bela's heart, which Other Mommy thinks is like a house to live in.
• Inescapable Horror: You can't escape Other Mommy, she will find you in a matter of hours.
• Invisible to Adults: Inverted. Other Mommy lives in the house for years, but hides at first from Bela's parents. She makes her grant introduction during a party they host, and subsequently chases away everybody that is trying to help the family.
• Mature Work, Child Protagonists: Part of the horror. 8-year-old Bela often narrates the ongoings without fully understanding what's going on.
• Meaningful Name: Bela means "devour" and "heart" as well as "to ruin".
• Must Be Invited: Other Mommy cannot just take Bela and possess her. She needs explicit permission, though not necessarily informed consent given Bela's age.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Malerman deliberately chooses not to outright explain what Other Mommy exactly is, where she came from or how she got into Bela's wardrobe, or on what rules she operates on.
• Parents as People: Bela's parents regularly become drunk at night and come into her room to talk about things going on in their lives, thinking she is asleep.
• Poltergeist: The first signs of Other Mommy are doors opening themselves and creaking floorboards upstairs when Russ and Bela are home alone.
• Remarried to the Mistress: Ursula marries Russ after her husband left her for her affair with him.
• Rule of Symbolism: While Other Mommy is very real, she also represents the dysfunction of the family. If you take her out of the picture, you still have a family with unhappy parents, one of them cheating, both of them regularly drunk and/or high, ignoring their child whilst fighting, a grandmother who tells them to stop calling authorities to figure it out themselves, grown-up friends who refuse to help, being frightened the deterioration will infect their families, and authorities who believe it can't be that bad, so they refuse to look into it. The only person who is willing to help and listens to Bela is driven away by her mother, who took a disliking to them. Now, how many people have that exact same story about their childhood? Notably, the more dysfunctional the family becomes, the stronger Other Mommy gets.
• Police Are Useless: The police checks the house for intruders twice, then Russ gives up calling, since Other Mommy is clearly otherworldly. The church doesn't believe Bela's family that an entity is attached to her, and the paranormal investigator they hire is too giddy that he actually saw and touched something unearthly to help.
• Serial Adulterer: Ursula cheated repeatedly on her first husband until she met Russ, whom she cheated with, resulting in their divorce. She when goes on to cheat on Russ with his friends. Notably, when her newest affair partner is killed by Other Mommy, Russ isn't surprised that she cheated, just with whom.
• Toilet Horror: Bela uses the toilet at the house of her grandmother's friend. She notes that she has trouble getting on, since it is much higher than any other toilet she ever used. While she is peeing, she looks down and sees Other Mommy's legs under her own, actually sitting in her lap.
• Unnamed Parent: Subverted. While Bela calls her family Mommy, Daddo, and Grandma, from dialogue the reader learns their names are Ursula, Russ, and Ruth.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Other Mommy can take on the voice and looks of everybody. Bela often still notices it's her, since the face is slipping off or the conversation starts to go to Bela's heart.
• Was It Really Worth It?: Other Mommy wins and is allowed to take over Bela's body. But in the process, she killed and alienated everybody and Bela has no-one left in the world, giving Other Mommy absolutely no reason to enjoy her new house.
• Would Hurt a Child: Other Mommy would never physically hurt Bela — but psychological torture is still on the table.