⭐️⭐️
Incidents Around the House was my first Josh Malerman book. I’ve heard good things about his writing, so I went in with fairly high expectations, thinking this would be a great introduction. Unfortunately, it didn’t really work for me, and I came away feeling pretty underwhelmed.
The premise itself has a lot of potential—a house, unsettling events, that sense of something watching from the edges—but instead of tightening the screws and pulling me into the suspense, the story kept circling around the same ideas without much progression. The pacing dragged in places where I was hoping for a sharp jolt, and the tension never quite built to the payoff I was waiting for.
One of the main issues for me was the repetition. It seems to follow a recent tradition I’ve noticed in horror novels, where the same scenes and ideas are revisited again and again. To me, it feels less like a stylistic choice and more like a way to pad the book out without actually adding substance. After a while, it just dulled the tension rather than building it.
The dialogue didn’t help either. For a book that’s meant to hinge on atmosphere and the characters’ responses to it, the conversations felt clunky and unnatural. Instead of pulling me further into the characters’ world, a lot of the dialogue came across as flat or even unintentionally awkward, which only undercut the mood.
Pair that with characters I never really connected with, and I struggled to care about what was happening or where it was leading. There are glimpses of what people must be talking about when they praise Malerman—moments of eerie imagery that show he knows how to create unease—but those moments are too few and too buried under meandering passages to really shine. By the time I reached the ending, I was more relieved to be done than gripped by the conclusion.
As a first impression of Malerman, this left me disappointed. I can see the potential, and I’ll probably try one of his more popular works before deciding if his writing is for me. But Incidents Around the House just didn’t deliver the kind of atmosphere, dialogue, or payoff I was hoping for. Two stars from me.
Gareth Ellis - Author 