Complete guide · Full spoilers

Incidents Around the House Summary and Complete Guide: Plot, Characters, Ending, Meaning (Full Spoilers)

Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman · Updated
The short version

This is the complete guide to Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman: the full plot summary from the first page to the last, every important scene, the characters, the themes, the ending, and what to read or watch next. If you're here for the plot, the summary and the answers, grab a snack, because this one runs about half an hour.

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In this article · 24 sections
  1. Hook And Warning
  2. The Book, The Author And The Family
  3. The First Chapters
  4. The Playground And The Doctor
  5. The Party And The Morning After
  6. The Zoo And The Empty Closet
  7. The Night Mommy Ran
  8. Amanda, Dan And Grandma Ruth
  9. Lois, The Circle And Kyle's Message
  10. Frank, The Gas Station And The Church
  11. Goblin And The Bathroom Scene
  12. The Fortress And The Fake Kelvin
  13. Brian The Investigator
  14. Knives And Lois's Plan
  15. The Beach
  16. The Lake And The Drive Home
  17. Grandma's Puzzle
  18. The Last Chapter
  19. The Ending Explained
  20. The Cast
  21. The Themes
  22. Symbols And Craft
  23. The Movie And What To Read Next
  24. Questions And Thanks

Hook And Warning

This is the complete guide to Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman: the full plot summary from the first page to the last, every important scene, the characters, the themes, the ending, and what to read or watch next.

Fair warning: this video is a full synopsis with every spoiler, including the ending. If you want to go in fresh, watch my spoiler-free review first. If you’re here for the plot, the summary and the answers, grab a snack, because this one runs about half an hour.

This guide is for two kinds of people. First, readers who finished the novel and want to talk through every scene, the Other Mommy rules, and what that last page means. Second, people who saw the Other Mommy movie and want to know how the book differs.

Here’s the plan. We start with the author, the format and the family. Then we go through the story in order, in about twelve parts. After that come the relationships, the themes and symbols, the ending explained, the movie, and what to read next. Then discussion questions, so you can keep talking.

The Book, The Author And The Family

Some basics. Incidents Around the House is a horror novel by Josh Malerman, published by Del Rey in June twenty twenty-four. Malerman is the Michigan author of Bird Box, and he is also a musician in a Detroit band called the High Strung. He has long been based in Ferndale, Michigan.

The book has fifty-one short numbered chapters, narrated by a little girl named Bela in first person, present tense. An author’s note explains the layout: narration is left aligned, dialogue is indented with gaps between, all in the name of perspective, because the story is told by a child.

Let’s meet everyone. Bela is the narrator, a literal-minded, observant child who loves to dance. Her mother is Ursula, called Urs, who works odd hours, drinks, and is restless in a way Bela can sense. Her father is Russ, whom Bela calls Daddo, a warm, jokey man who works from a desk in the den.

Around them are the supporting cast. Deb is Bela’s one friend at school. Kelvin is the teenage babysitter Bela adores. Grandma Ruth is Ursula’s mother, small and fierce, with an old dog named Milky. Lois Anthony is the red haired woman at a party who studies the occult.

Then there’s the thing in the closet. Bela calls her Other Mommy. She says Other Mommy told her to call her that, and that she has been her friend for as long as she can remember. At first they laughed and played staring games. Now she wants something, and she asks politely, every time.

The First Chapters

The book opens at bedtime. Bela says good night to Mommy and Daddo, and the second they leave, Other Mommy comes out of the closet. Bela is happy to see her. The next morning her mother feeds her oatmeal and hurries off to work, and Bela asks about the recycling bin.

Where does it go? Is it a better place? Her mom says it comes back as something else, and Bela thinks of carnations. In her room, Other Mommy sits next to her on the bed and asks the question she will repeat for the entire book: Can I go into your heart?

Bela once told her parents about Other Mommy. They laughed until her mother’s smile fell away, and the look Mommy gave through the crack of the door has stayed with Bela. Now Other Mommy is no longer waiting for night. She watches from upstairs windows, and in the den, Bela thinks she sees an eye shaped in the ceiling.

Over the next chapters, the haunting inches closer. Daddo smells something awful in Bela’s bathroom, like a gas station toilet, and blames the pipes. He gives Bela a Michigan puzzle to keep busy, and a pep talk about stage fright. Meanwhile Other Mommy asks again, and Bela says no and runs.

Mommy comes home late, a little drunk, and Bela tells her, you smell different. You smell like another person. Mommy sits on her bed, not knowing she is awake, and mutters what she is risking, how she has a family, why would she do this. Other Mommy slides into the ceiling corner, and Mommy feels watched.

The Playground And The Doctor

The first big break comes at the park. Bela is on the swings with Deb, while their mothers talk on a bench. Bela’s mom hides behind big sunglasses. Bela starts a scary story about a woman in a closet, and keeps pushing it even after Deb asks her to stop.

Deb runs into a little wooden room on the jungle gym and, from the dark, a voice asks, Can I go into your heart? Fingers with hair curl around the entrance. Bela panics, backs up too fast, and falls down the slide. For the first time ever, Other Mommy is outside the house.

During the chapter, Bela remembers one of her father’s late night speeches, about the worst cruelty being when a person believes the whole world is as mean as they are. Daddo tells her to never let someone else’s meanness inside her. It’s a warning that gets a terrible echo later.

At Dr. Smith’s office, the doctor, who looks a bit like Abraham Lincoln, asks if Bela felt dizzy or saw something strange. Bela says no, then lets the name slip. Other Mommy. Her parents tell the doctor she used that name a couple of years ago, and that they don’t know who she is. It’s a kid thing, Mommy says. Then she tells Russ they should cancel the party that night. He says no.

Dr. Smith tells Bela to watch the geese and ducks when she’s nervous. Sometimes, he says, out of the corner of his eye, it looks as if a goose catches a duck. It’s a small scene, but it plants the book’s whole idea: the scariest things happen at the edges of what you see.

The Party And The Morning After

Chapter eleven is the party, one of the best set pieces. Kelvin babysits, Bela dances for the guests, and her father introduces her to Lois Anthony, who thinks Bela might be a Sensitive. She touches Bela’s shoulder twice, feels nothing, and asks, are you seeing ghosts? How about one ghost? The ceiling creaks.

Downstairs, Bela notices her mother holding hands with a man in the foyer. A guest tells a ghost story about a dead aunt behind a furnace. Then a woman named Marsha screams, because she saw a tall dark blue thing with hair in the living room. The crowd blames weed and drinks.

Bela steps forward and says, That was not a monster, Marsha. That was Other Mommy. Her mother stares at her like she wants her to stay quiet. Lois, still sitting by the fireplace, looks right at Bela, and from this moment she is the adult who believes.

That night, Bela lies awake while Daddo sits on her bed, thinking she’s asleep. He talks about a classmate named Quinn Dole, who died young and missed every ordinary feeling. Then he stands, faces the closet, and says: if there’s anything in this house, get out. The closet doors creak open.

In the morning her mother walks in, still in her party jacket, and asks about Marsha. She wants Bela to describe Other Mommy. Bela says her eyes are sometimes on the sides of her head, sometimes on the bottom of her face, and she’s bigger than Daddo. Mommy asks, has she ever talked to you? Then Daddo runs in, and she never asks it again.

The Zoo And The Empty Closet

Chapter fourteen takes place at the Chaps zoo, a place Bela’s parents use to talk, so she is sent ahead to the reptile house while they argue in each other’s ears. In the penguin house, Daddo gives her a piggyback ride, and for a moment it feels like old times. Then Lois Anthony appears and invites them to her Friday group.

Ursula is furious. She calls the occult baloney, a kind of mayonnaise brain, and she and Russ argue by the butterfly house. Bela is sent ahead into the humid, leafy room, where she finds a red butterfly, and then something blinks. A blue eye, buried in the green leaves.

She runs out through the doors, past a zoo worker, screaming that Other Mommy could be anywhere. Her mother grabs her arm. Mommy blames Lois, and she says, This stops now. Bela already knows the thing is no longer tied to the house.

The next chapter is short and tense. Ursula empties Bela’s closet and bathroom, piling the clothes on the floor, saying see, nowhere for anything to hide. Bela must sleep with the door open, and not use the closet. Mommy opens a window, tells her to nap, and leaves.

Bela is oddly pleased that her mother is angry. Maybe, she thinks, she isn’t alone anymore with this. But lying there she watches a T-shirt move in the wind, and the pile of clothes looks big enough to hide someone. It is a classic horror move, turning a clean room into a fresh hiding place.

The Night Mommy Ran

Then comes the chapter people remember. Bela wakes in the dark to hear her mother’s voice at her bedside, confessing that she has been cheating on Daddo since before they married, that parenthood is a prison, that she lusts. The speech is long, and Bela slowly realizes something is wrong.

The voice goes on about reincarnation, and about how nice it would be if Bela let her in, as friends do. Then a figure appears in the doorway and says, Bela? Who are you talking to in there? It is the real Mommy. The voice at the bedside was Other Mommy, wearing her voice.

Bela sees Other Mommy on the end of the bed, with a big, crazy face. Mommy turns on the light and screams, because she sees her too. She grabs Bela, runs downstairs, drags her out on the lawn, and shakes while staring up at the window. Bela confirms: Other Mommy.

This is the pivot of the book. Until now only Bela, and a shaken party guest, have clearly seen her. Now a parent has. Mommy refuses to describe it later, saying only that it wasn’t a woman. She has to live with that, and so do the readers.

Amanda, Dan And Grandma Ruth

The family stays with their friends Amanda and Dan, who have a baby. The police find nothing at the house, and in a long night of whispering, Bela hears the breath someone takes before they speak. Dan thinks he sees Ursula in his bedroom while she is outside on the phone. Scared for their baby, the couple asks the family to leave, and Ursula calls her own mother.

On the drive, Daddo almost hits a deer, then another, and they laugh until they stop. It shows how isolating a haunting is: friends back away, and the family becomes the one nobody wants near.

At Grandma Ruth’s little house, with its Loblolly Pines and dog named Milky, the parents lie that the power went out. Ruth is not fooled. She notices they never mention Bela’s hunger, and she demands the truth. They say nothing, and the whole family sleeps on the living room floor.

In the morning Ursula says they should burn the house, and Russ suggests a camper road trip. Ruth interrupts: they need an exorcist. She sits Bela down, and in a scene I love, treats her like an equal. How many times did she see it? Maybe a hundred. Has it talked? What does it ask?

Bela finally says it out loud, in front of everyone: she asks if she can go into my heart. Her mother puts a hand to her chest. Ruth suggests it could be an intruder in a costume, but she says the police can’t help if it isn’t a person.

Lois, The Circle And Kyle’s Message

In the Loblolly Pines, Daddo tells Bela that nobody is allowed to touch her, and she admits she held hands with Other Mommy once. Then Ursula leaves in the car, to see a friend. Daddo calls the police about a possible intruder, while Ruth stands among the trees, looking up, sure that nobody is taking over her house.

At a Big Boy restaurant, Lois arrives in a green car and asks the key question: does this thing make deals? Bela explains that if she says yes, they trade places and she goes where Other Mommy comes from. Lois calls it possession, says it is no ghost, and that Bela must never say yes.

Lois invites her friends to her home. They sit in a circle with crystals, a microphone and an old telephone. When Lois explains the target, her friends argue that it might be nefarious. They light colored candles and send a thought to Other Mommy. Then a man named Kyle goes silent, and whispers to Bela.

Kyle says Other Mommy answered, and that she wants Bela to know she gave her a present. He blows out the candles. The doorbell rings and Mommy is at the door, crying, saying, He’s dead. She means Frank Doherty, the man Bela now realizes was holding her mother’s hand at the party. She found him in his bedroom closet, as if he had slept there.

Frank, The Gas Station And The Church

The family can’t go home, and Ursula insists on going to Frank’s house, which she has a key to. In the dark house Russ asks Bela if Other Mommy is here. Bela does not know. Russ explodes at his wife. Ruth steers them all out, and Bela thinks: maybe Other Mommy did this for me.

This is the book’s cruelest turn. The monster is not just scary, it’s helping, in a way a child’s friend might. Bela realizes she is scared she knows how to stop everything, and scared she will say yes.

They spend a night in the car at a gas station, where Bela remembers how Other Mommy first spoke to her, saying hello, and who are you? She sees a face sliding down a car’s wet windshield, upside down, and can’t tell whether the man’s squeegee got all the way down to the eyes.

In the morning, Mommy and Grandma ask for help from a church, and the priests refuse. They say they’d need proof, and ask whether the family uses drugs. They suggest the police. Russ sits with Bela on a bench outside, and says one day this will be a legend in your life.

Mommy comes down the steps and says they have to kill it themselves. The priests walk past in black, and Bela feels the entire world is turning away. She imagines hurting Other Mommy, then wonders which is worse: hurting her, or helping.

Goblin And The Bathroom Scene

Next the family drives around the city of Goblin, asking in gift shops and headshops for anyone who knows about this. In the rain, Ruth finds a friend named Evelyn, who lives in an enormous house on the edge of town. Evelyn gives them frozen pizza and bourbon, puts on The Hollies, and the parents dance with Bela. Daddo is drunk, and jokes that Mommy moves like Other Mommy.

Late that night, Bela wakes needing to pee, and cannot wake her sleeping parents. In the upstairs hall she finds the bathroom. She thinks Evelyn is sitting in the bathtub behind the curtain, but it’s empty. Then she sits on the toilet, and feels like she’s on someone’s lap. She looks down and sees other legs beneath hers, with dark hair.

She falls and sees Other Mommy against the wall, with no face. It’s in her hands. Evelyn screams from the hall. Other Mommy rises to the ceiling, spread like a flat balloon, and follows them out of the room. The family flees into the rain while Evelyn screams at them to take it with them. That is the bathroom scene.

The Fortress And The Fake Kelvin

Back home, the family turns the house into a fortress. A black van from Chaps Security installs cameras, motion detectors and alarms in every room, even the closets. Two Cane Corso guard dogs arrive with trainers, Kami and Kamael, who are trained on the family’s scent and told to guard every way in. Nobody is allowed to pet them.

Bela thinks it is her fault, and that if she had just said yes, none of this would be happening. She also remembers the time Other Mommy laughed in Kelvin’s voice, telling her she could sound just like everyone she knows. She touches her pulse, and wonders if there is room in her heart for two.

Daddo searches online for anyone who can help, finding exorcists and investigators, some of whom look like they are in costume. Mommy snaps at him to stop. One night, Bela falls asleep on the couch and wakes in her own upstairs bedroom, in the dark, with no nightlight. Downstairs she hears a party.

A voice says, Hey Bela. It is Kelvin, with white blue eyes in the dark. He says her parents asked him to watch her, and offers a deal: if she lets him be her for just one day, he can say all the things that would make her parents love each other again. His finger is dark with hair.

Bela refuses and runs downstairs, while the dogs growl at the top of the staircase and the house goes quiet. Her parents wake in the dark living room, and Daddo’s phone shows the camera footage, which he doesn’t describe. They flee into the yard, and Daddo calls Kelvin, to check he isn’t there. Then he calls a stranger for help.

Brian The Investigator

The stranger is Brian, a big, bald man in black clothes and gloves, who refuses to call it a ghost or a demon. It’s a pest, he says, a very big pest. He walks through the house alone with a flashlight and the dogs outside, then announces he is going to trick it.

Ursula hates him. She thinks he’s a scam, he refuses to watch the camera footage, and he falls asleep at the dining table with a bag of chips. Grandma Ruth arrives in her red flannel shirt, with a World’s Toughest Grandmother T-shirt underneath, so the dogs can learn her scent. Brian refuses to talk, listening to a tape recorder.

That night, the dogs stare at the dining room. Brian stands in front of Other Mommy, who kneels with her eyes at the top of her head, and tells everyone not to move. Her mouth droops and stretches to the carpet. A wind fills the room, and she screams with a voice like an earthquake. Brian reaches out and touches her face.

When the wind stops, Other Mommy is gone, and Brian is smiling. He gathers his gear and walks out, saying only, I’ve seen one. It’s all I ever wanted. Daddo chases him to the street and swings a fist, misses, and is hit in the nose. Mommy screams and kicks the car as Brian drives off.

The neighbors watch, and a man crosses the road to ask if they want the police. No, they say. They have to do it themselves. Mommy and Daddo touch foreheads on the curb, nodding like one person making one decision, while blood drips from Daddo’s nose and tears roll down Mommy’s face.

Knives And Lois’s Plan

One day they shave, shower, cut their hair and dress as if for a party. Bela puts on her party clothes. Her parents each carry a knife, and they walk down the stairs with her in the middle. Mommy says: this is our house, this is our child, this is our fight.

That night, Mommy and Daddo hear the house creak and go upstairs, with Bela between them. They open a dark storage closet at the end of the hall, a second pantry, and smell her. From inside, Other Mommy says, Hello, and who are you? Then, Do you like me better in here? They charge in, stabbing at the dark.

The stabbing is interrupted by the doorbell. When they look inside again the closet is empty, and Bela’s bedroom door slams. The doorbell rings again. It’s Lois Anthony, who has come to the house at night, and sees two terrified parents with knives. She tells them she has learned how to get rid of the thing.

You can’t hurt it, she says, and you can’t talk to it. You have to get rid of what it wants. It wants Bela, and it is attracted to her innocence. We have to take that innocence away. She says Grandma Ruth told her everything at the motel, and that they must go somewhere far, away from the house.

Mommy laughs and says it follows them, but Daddo says they’re at their end. They agree to give her an hour. The dogs go back to the trainers, and the four of them drive a hundred miles to Lake Michigan, toward Glen Arbor and Sleeping Bear Dunes.

The Beach

On the beach, Lois sets up an umbrella, blankets and pillows. Bela’s parents sleep. Lois asks Bela questions: was she scared the first time? Did she tell Other Mommy personal things? What does she know about her? Bela says Other Mommy told her it would be as easy as slipping into a dress.

Lois looks sick. They both watch a dog-like shape crawling along the sand far away, and no matter how long they watch it, it never gets closer. That night, around a fire, Lois explains innocence, and that the innocent are targeted first. Daddo can’t decide. Mommy goes first.

She tells Bela about her first marriage, to a man named Douglas Cain, the affairs, the bakery where she met Russ, the paternity test, and the fact that Douglas, not Russ, is Bela’s biological father. That the college story was a lie. That Russ chose to be her dad. Bela stands, runs, and refuses to hear more.

Bela runs down the dark beach, away from the fire. Her family catches her, and everyone cries. She says Other Mommy isn’t here. She’s gone. It worked. She decides to lie like they did, and keeps repeating it while she can smell Other Mommy and see her on all fours up the beach, between her parents.

The Lake And The Drive Home

The next morning she walks away from Daddo, and he tries to explain how a secret like this grows. She screams at him, you’re not my dad. Then she asks what she should call him now. He says whatever she wants. She doesn’t say she wants to call him liar.

She runs into the lake, clothes and all, and goes under, screaming. In the water she sees Other Mommy’s hairy legs and three toed feet on the rocky bottom, and doesn’t want to come up. Her family drags her out. Mommy slaps Lois, who leaves. Daddo tells Bela the trouble was never only at home, it is inside all of them.

Back in the car, Ursula blames herself. She says the haunting is comeuppance, that she has treated relationships like they were meaningless, that she never says thank you, and that Other Mommy exists because this Mommy took everything for granted. Daddo tells her to stop, but she keeps going, even saying she wishes she could have dropped Bela off somewhere and never come back.

Bela, alone in the back seat, feels something pushing against the seat from the trunk. A fingertip, she thinks. She pulls the seat forward and sees only dark. Outside, she sees a woman with dark hair on her shoulders walking along the trees. The family is being followed, and no one else is looking.

At home, Grandma Ruth is waiting in the driveway. Bela asks, are you really my grandma? Ruth says, absolutely, without looking at her parents. The four of them stand in the driveway, facing the house, one little family on one little street, and everything that happens inside.

Grandma’s Puzzle

Mommy and Daddo go upstairs while Ruth sits with Bela on the couch and delivers one of the book’s most important speeches. She says to think of your heart like a house, with defined rooms and hidden spaces between them, and that you must decide what feelings to let in. Don’t, she says, make a statue of what you feel.

Then they work on the Michigan puzzle. Bela, sleepy, keeps closing her eyes, and each time she opens them, Grandma has completed more. The beach, the road home, the word Chaps, a tiny car. Bela spots a wave that isn’t moving. She sees a hair on the back of Grandma’s finger. Grandma’s face seems lower on her head.

Grandma says every house is just one room, filled with decisions: make a happy home, a lying home, a cheating home. Would you have closets in your home? Would you invite other people into your house? Into your heart? That is when Bela knows it is not her grandmother, and gets down from the chair, and runs.

The Last Chapter

Bela hides in the closet in the front hall. She hears creaking, and her parents snoring in the dining room. Then Grandma’s voice screams upstairs, telling someone to stay away, and Mommy and Daddo wake and run up the stairs. Bela shouts that she is in the closet, but they can’t hear.

She feels a hand between the coats. She kicks open the door and in the light from the living room sees Grandma Ruth in the closet, eyes closed, hands folded across her chest. Upstairs there is screaming, a heavy thud, a growl so deep that it rattles the windows. Then the house goes quiet.

Bela climbs the stairs, still calling for them. In her bedroom, Mommy and Daddo are lying with their faces in the carpet. She tells them it’s okay to sleep, that she is awake for them, and climbs into her bed. Other Mommy steps out of the closet and asks again, Can I go into your heart? Bela remembers her parents laughing at movies, and says: Yes.

The Ending Explained

After the yes, Other Mommy’s eyes are where they are supposed to be, white blue, and she vanishes. Then she is sitting on the bed where Bela was, her face wet, needing to wipe her nose. They have traded places. Bela is somewhere else, in a corner of a space big enough to hold everything anyone has said.

She understands where Other Mommy comes from. It is not a closet, and it is not a heart. It has so much room. She hopes to find someone there to carnation for her. Her last words are, Hello, I’m Bela, and the last page says it isn’t a house and it isn’t a home.

So what happens to the family? The book never states it. Grandma looks dead, the parents lie motionless, and Other Mommy now lives in Bela’s place. My reading is a cycle: a child said yes long ago, waited in that space, and now Bela is the new voice in the dark, perhaps for another family.

The Cast

Let’s look at the relationships. Bela and Daddo are best friends, and he is her emotional anchor, a man who calls every problem an opportunity. Bela and Mommy are closer to strangers, held together by love and fear. Mommy is not a villain, but she is a woman who feels trapped by motherhood.

Russ and Ursula are the real subject: a couple who bonded over jokes and nature documentaries, and who began as an affair. Their biggest secret, that Russ is not Bela’s father, is told by a fire on a cold beach. Their love is real, and so are the lies, and the book lets both be true.

Then Ruth, who bluntly says what others avoid, and who may be the strongest adult in the story. Lois, a sincere but out of her depth believer. Kelvin, the babysitter whose voice is stolen. And Brian, who proves that sometimes the expert is the person who wants to see the monster most.

The Themes

First theme: the child who sees everything. Bela hears adults when they think she sleeps, and the book is about how much children understand about their parents’ unhappiness. The monster becomes a way of telling the truth about what a child knows.

Second theme: marriage and secrets. Infidelity, a hidden paternity, drinking to cope, jokes to avoid hard talks. Every secret is a closet. Third theme: innocence, and who gets to take it away. Lois’s plan to remove Bela’s innocence sounds wise and turns out to be the worst idea in the book.

Fourth theme: the tension between kindness and cruelty, from Daddo’s lesson about Oren to Bela’s final choice. Daddo teaches her not to let anyone else’s meanness inside, but at the end she lets in the only thing that listened. Fifth: loneliness. The thing that finally gets in is someone who asked, kindly, for years.

Symbols And Craft

Here are the symbols. The closet is the hidden part of every person. Carnations and reincarnation: a word mishearing that grows into the mechanism of the haunting. The Michigan puzzle is the world made manageable, and the way the puzzle eerily completes itself shows it is no longer safe.

Ducks and geese show predators at the edge of vision. The dancing woman in a framed picture symbolizes the freedom Mommy craves. And the house as a heart, with its hidden rooms, is the central metaphor. Even the title works: an incident is something that happens around you before you realize it’s yours.

On craft, the child narration is the trick, because it lets Malerman hide the facts in plain sight. The prose is simple and rhythmic. Phrases repeat like song choruses. It’s relentless, which is both the strength and the weakness. Some readers will find the repetition hypnotic, and some will find it padded.

Now the movie. As of October twenty twenty-six, the adaptation is called Other Mommy, from Universal, Blumhouse and Atomic Monster. It was directed by Rob Savage, written by Nathan Elston and produced by James Wan. Jessica Chastain stars, reportedly playing both Ursula and the entity, with Jay Duplass, Dichen Lachman and Karen Allen. Filming reportedly took place in Dublin.

It opened in the United States on October ninth, twenty twenty-six, after being moved from May. Reportedly it earned about twenty-seven million dollars on opening weekend against a budget around nineteen million. Critics were harsh, with a Rotten Tomatoes score under twenty percent, and audiences gave it a D plus from CinemaScore.

Most importantly for this video, reports say the ending is different. In the film, Bela keeps refusing and survives with her parents. In the book she says yes. If you want the film’s tone, it’s more conventional horror. If you want the book’s tone, it’s sadder and stranger.

If you loved this book, here is where to go. For more Malerman, read Bird Box and its sequel Malorie, or the short novella A House at the Bottom of a Lake. For the Other Mother idea, read Coraline by Neil Gaiman. For classic haunted houses, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

For a child narrator and a possession, try A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. I have a whole video on books like this one and the Josh Malerman books in order, so look for it on the channel. And as of October twenty twenty-six, his newest novel is Pictures of You.

Questions And Thanks

Let’s finish with questions for your book club. One: is Other Mommy real, or is she Bela’s way of processing her parents’ marriage? Two: why does Bela say yes, and is it a choice? Three: did Frank’s death make Other Mommy a friend or a predator?

Four: was Lois right about innocence, or did her plan cause the ending? Five: do you think Russ and Ursula survive? Six: what is the difference between the film’s ending and the book’s, and which is better? Seven: what do you think happens to Bela now?

That’s the complete guide to Incidents Around the House. If it helped, please like it and subscribe, because it helps this channel a lot. Links to the book, the audiobook and the books I mentioned are in the description.

Now tell me in the comments: what do you think Other Mommy is, and would you have said yes? Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.

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Incidents Around the House: quick answers

What is the plot of Incidents Around the House?

A girl named Bela is visited by Other Mommy, an entity in her closet who asks to enter her heart. Her family flees from friend to friend, tries priests, a psychic circle and an investigator, and is told to take Bela's innocence away. In the end Bela says yes and trades places with Other Mommy.

Is Incidents Around the House based on a true story?

No. It is a work of fiction by Josh Malerman, set in Michigan.

How many chapters does Incidents Around the House have?

51 short numbered chapters, plus an author's note, narrated in the first person by Bela.

What does the ending of Incidents Around the House mean?

Most readers see a cycle: Bela says yes, takes Other Mommy's place in the dark space she came from, and becomes the next voice waiting for a child to say yes. The book leaves the fate of her family open.

Get Incidents Around the House

Incidents Around the House on AmazonIncidents Around the House audiobook

Mentioned: Bird Box · Malorie · Unbury Carol · Inspection · A House at the Bottom of a Lake · Goblin · Black Mad Wheel · Pearl · Daphne · Spin a Black Yarn · Pictures of You · Coraline · The Haunting of Hill House · The Turn of the Screw · A Head Full of Ghosts · House of Leaves · The Exorcist

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