Incidents Around the House, by Josh Malerman | Free Audiobook

Bela's logic stays consistently childlike throughout, which is exactly what makes this book unsettling rather than simply strange. She misreads adult conversations, misunderstands what her parents are actually fighting about, and takes Other Mommy's presence at face value long after any adult reader would be sounding every alarm available. That gap between what Bela understands and what the reader can piece together is where most of the dread lives.

The parents, Ursula and Russ, are handling their own unraveling marriage alongside whatever is happening to their daughter, and Malerman lets those two crises bleed into each other in a way that feels honest rather than convenient. Neither adult is particularly likable, which oddly makes their inability to protect Bela more believable.

Other Mommy herself is rationed out carefully. Malerman resists the urge to over-explain what she is or where she comes from, and that restraint keeps the entity genuinely frightening well past the book's midpoint.

The final stretch, when the household's cracks finally give way entirely, earns its ending without over-explaining what has happened, and that ambiguity has stuck with me since I finished it.

On the narration: Delanie Nicole Gill, in her audiobook debut, gives Bela a voice that sounds genuinely like a child rather than an adult performing childlike inflection, which is a harder trick than it sounds. Her delivery leans into Bela's small, matter-of-fact observations rather than pushing them toward melodrama, and that restraint is exactly what makes the scarier moments land. It is easy to see why the novel earned a Bram Stoker Award nomination and is now headed to the screen as the film Other Mommy, starring Jessica Chastain.