A Way-Too-Early Halloween at Shangrila Towers, Part 3 - Incidents Around the House

Spooky Season seems to come around sooner and sooner each year, and I am leaning into the madness with a series of Halloween-themed blog posts well in advance of the big night. Today, let's look at a horror novel by Josh Malerman, author of Bird Box:

Malerman gives himself a very tough assignment in Incidents Around the House: the entire story is told from the first-person perspective of an 8-year old girl named Bela, as she and her family are haunted by a mysterious entity. Malerman's perspective experiment has problems (Bela's voice sometimes feels younger or older than she is, and her parents inexplicably start monologuing to her whenever they think she is asleep), but it's certainly the most clever thing about the book, which is otherwise a prototypical haunted house/boogeyman tale. 

There are some great jump scares, and Michigan is always a creepy place to be followed by a supernatural entity, but the book is about 100 pages too long.  By the third or fourth time Bela's family flees to a place of seeming safety, only to be scared away by some horrible incident, you'll start hoping the entity just finishes the job so you can read something else. I hope that the upcoming film adaptation Other Mommy cuts some of the narrative fat out.