BOOK REPORT: BIRD BOX BY JOSH MALERMAN

BIRD BOX  BY JOSH MALERMAN WAS A SURPRISE READ FOR ME. It’s a really scary story! Something is driving humanity insane (besides us); some malevolent force or entity once glimpsed by a person which causes them to go insane. What or who it is remains unclear. The story’s protagonist, a pregnant Malorie, finds refuge in a suburban Detroit home with several others as they seek to come to terms with the end of the “old world” and the beginning of the new. The tale is told in a third-person narration primarily through the thoughts, memories and experiences of Malorie as she attempts to keep her children and those close to her safe in a world grown deadly beyond measure. Confined for years in a house with boarded-up windows and locked doors and only able to venture outside (to the well for water, for supplies) blindfolded, Malorie must make a choice whether to remain or to chance a hazardous journey to a distant refuge.

It’s an odd, even silly premise, having to negotiate the outside world blindfolded, suggesting there will be a rather slow pace to things, but author Josh Malmerman’s tight plotting, crisp writing style and sharply drawn examinations of people, their psychologies, fears, failings and strengths, makes for a definite page turner.

I am reminded of the 1963 horror movie The Haunting and the scene where Julie Harris’s character is wakened by her roommate who has come to her bedside and is holding her hand. Both are fearful of something evil within the house they are visiting. Both are too frightened to speak. We hear Julie Harris’s panicked thoughts as she works up the courage to scream for help, and then there is the slow and growing realization that the hand she is holding may not be that of her roommate (the room is in darkness). The tension builds to a climactic moment as we discover the truth. It’s a nail-biting scene, and Bird Box provides a number of such scenes as Malorie’s time in Riverbridge Road house is told through a series of flashbacks. Malmerman’s use of short, declarative sentences, internal monologues, flashbacks and foreshadowing, add to a roller-coaster ride of tension and discovery.

I think truly well-crafted horror stories don’t reveal everything (unlike movie-maker M. Night Shyamalan who ‘splains way too much!), and I think this adds to the tension and claustrophobic atmosphere. And as with all good horror stories that deal with monsters, real or imagined, there is the suggestion that we have the potential to be the most dangerous monster of them all. Listen to the bird box!

Josh Malerman

I found the growing tensions between individuals living at Riverbridge Road more disturbing than even the threats they faced from outside their walls. The walls within the home that grew between people were more terrifying to me than anything else. Malmerman explores the darker side of human nature and how we can lose our humanity and become alien to each other. That is frightening. The potrayal of some of Malorie's housemates as they descend into despair and sociopathy makes for rising levels of tension and paranoia that resolves in a climax that comes through in a deftly constructed plot.

 Well done! (I note Malmerman is shortly publishing (fall, 2019) a sequel, and I am looking forward to not being disappointed with it. (Don’t explain it all, Josh! Let us figure the rest out!)


Cheers

"Yeaah. You didn't scare me! Nahhh."