{Halloween Series} Review: Bird Box by Josh Malerman
Title:Bird Box
Author: Josh Malerman
Publication Date: May 13, 2014
Publisher: Ecco
Genre: Adult Fiction, Horror, Suspense/Thriller
Find it: Amazon // B&N // Book Depository // Goodreads
Source: Library
Rating: 4 stars- Stay up late
Something is out there, something terrifying that must not be seen. One glimpse of it, and a person is driven to deadly violence. No one knows what it is or where it came from.
Five years after it began, a handful of scattered survivors remains, including Malorie and her two young children. Living in an abandoned house near the river, she has dreamed of fleeing to a place where they might be safe. Now that the boy and girl are four, it’s time to go, but the journey ahead will be terrifying: twenty miles downriver in a rowboat–blindfolded–with nothing to rely on but her wits and the children’s trained ears. One wrong choice and they will die. Something is following them all the while, but is it man, animal, or monster?
Interweaving past and present, Bird Box is a snapshot of a world unraveled that will have you racing to the final page.
The best way to describe Bird Box by Josh Malerman is creepy. It’s the type of horror novel that plays off your fear of the unknown. What is out there that is driving everyone who sees it into a murderous and suicidal rage? Obviously no one can say because everyone who has seen it is dead. Is it a mysterious creature, aliens or some kind of fog that attacks the viewer? It’s unknown which is part of why it’s so unnerving.
The story of Bird Box goes back and forth between the present and the past. The present is about Malorie and her two young children trying to make their way to a safe haven. The past follows Malorie from when the whole unknown began and how she got to be in her present situation. One of the main reasons that I don’t like dystopian novels is because they usually take place one or two hundred years after something significant happened and this is how they live now because of that situation. Bird Box shows the before, the during and the after. It show the transition and how people were forced to adapt and forced to figure out a new way to live.
What I didn’t like about the book is that it can be really slow at times. I guess not much can happen where there are eight people stuck in a house and they can’t go outside. So often times there’s a whole chapter of the housemates just sitting around playing cards or Malorie worrying about what’s going to happen when she goes into labor. But hoping that the unknown is revealed at the end was enough to keep me interested….most of the time. Since it’s all from Malorie’s POV, the riverboat scenes were really suspenseful because the reader doesn’t know anything that Malories doesn’t know and Malorie is blindfolded the whole time she’s rowing the boat! It really is a crazy journey that she has to make down the river with her two five your old children who were trained to hear every little thing since they were born.
Bird Box is scary, creepy, gory, sad and people die. A lot of people die. It’s definitely a good fall/Halloween/October read!
