Bird Box: A Novel Audio CD – Audiobook, CD
Author: Visit ‘s Josh Malerman Page ID: 1483004368
From Booklist
Malorie, a young mother of two children known simply as Boy and Girl, is a survivor living in a postapocalyptic world, raising her children to use all their senses, especially their listening skills, as sight is not an option here. In this world, the survivors struggle to stay alive by living indoors with all the windows boarded up. The sight of whatever is outside is causing people to become violent murderers, as well as suicidal, in the most horrific ways possible. The book moves back and forth over a four-year period when all the insanity began, exploring the personalities of the people that came together and survived and how they managed to live after all forms of communication effectively withered and died with most of the population. The characters are involving, the story moves along very rapidly as the suspense builds, but unfortunately, the ending is a disappointment. The reason for all the bloodshed is never explored or explained. Still, recommend this one to readers who enjoy a blend of horror and postapocalyptic fiction. –Stacy Alesi
–This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
“A book that demands to be read in a single sitting, and through the cracks between one’s fingers. There has never been a horror story quite like this. Josh Malerman truly delivers.” (—Hugh Howey, New York Times bestselling author of Wool)
“This completely compelling novel contains a thousand subtle touches but no mere flourishes-it is so well, so efficiently, so directly written I read it with real admiration. Josh Malerman does the job like a fast-talking, wised-up angel.” -Peter Straub (—Peter Straub)
“[A] chilling debut… Malerman…keeps us tinglingly on edge with his cool, merciless storytelling [and] douses his tale in poetic gloom….An unsettling thriller, this earns comparisons to Hitchcock’s The Birds, as well as the finer efforts of Stephen King and cult sci-fi fantasist Jonathan Carroll.” (—Kirkus Reviews (starred review))
“The author uses understatement and allusion to create a lean, spellbinding thriller that Stephen King fans will relish.” (—Publishers Weekly (starred review))
–This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Audio CD: 1 pagesPublisher: HarperCollins Audio and Blackstone Audio; Unabridged edition (May 13, 2014)Language: EnglishISBN-10: 1483004368ISBN-13: 978-1483004365 Product Dimensions: 1 x 5.5 x 5.8 inches Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies) Best Sellers Rank: #1,773,536 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #317 in Books > Books on CD > Horror #5506 in Books > Books on CD > Literature & Fiction > Unabridged #5956 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Post-Apocalyptic
This book was recommended to me by a friend who apparently knows me better than I know myself. I don’t usually read speculative fiction, as I generally like my trash a little more grounded in reality, which is to say, even the horrors of the night won’t keep us all away from Facebook. As such, post-apocalyptic stuff usually doesn’t interest me. I mean, there are only so many ways to tell the story of “we have to rebuild civilization while protecting ourselves from whatever destroyed it”, right?
Bird Box is the same, but catchier. It opens with a woman named Malorie waking up and deciding that today is the day she will row twenty miles down a river, blindfolded, with her two young children, to try to reach other survivors. And that’s when I said “wait, hold up. Twenty miles to where? Why blindfolded? Survivors of what?” And just like that, Josh Malerman got me.
It all begins five years before, in the present day, somewhere in Russia. A couple of guys are in a car, the passenger asks the driver to pull over, then viciously and gruesomely murders him and kills himself. It’s a weird anomaly, like the guy who ate the other guy’s face in Florida a while back. Normally, a story like that would hit the news, then fade. But before long, there are many more such stories that all end the same way – with the perpetrator killing themselves before anyone can find out why. And as the events spread to the US, there are more and more paranoid theories, and fewer and fewer people to repeat them. The only constant is that the people who have been driven mad have opened their eyes outside.
Malorie has just found out she is pregnant when she loses her sister, parents, and everyone else she has known.
Is what you can imagine in your mind as a reader more horrifying than anything a writer can show you in a story? That’s the narrative trick that cranks the horror in Josh Malerman’s Bird Box. But it just didn’t work for me. I finished the book, turned off the lights, and went to bed.
The story takes place on two levels. The present-day story follows Malorie, a young mother with two small children, who are hiding in a house in the woods outside Detroit. We learn that the outside world is dangerous. Something happened, something is roaming the streets. It is so terrifying that just one glance at it with your eyes drives you into a murderous rage. Malorie takes defensive measures: blindfolds. She wears them. She makes her kids wear them. Over the last four years Malorie has been getting ready to leave their hideaway house, training her kids to rely on their hearing, teaching them to stay calm when they hear unfamiliar things. A safe haven exists somewhere. To reach it they must travel by boat on the river—and elude whatever it is prowling outside.
The second story, told in flashbacks, tells the origins of how Malorie and her kids end up where they are. We learn how the chaos began, how it unfolded, and how the insanity spread. Malorie was pregnant when things started going south. She found refuge with fellow survivors, though their little post-apocalyptic bastion soon falls apart, succumbing to dwindling resources, desperation, cabin fever, and the creeping fear of what’s outside.
Taking away our sense of sight, the author asks us to grope along with the characters. It’s amazing how much we rely on what we ‘see’ in fiction to propel us through a story.
In all honesty, when this book first came to my attention, I didn’t quite know what to expect because there was very little information available. In my mind, given the cover and title, I was thinking it would be something along the lines of a retelling of Hitchcock’s The Birds. It is not. What it is, is a well-written, bleak, frightening, tragic, and utterly suspenseful read that (pardon the pun) flies by when you begin reading it.
The first reports originate in Russia and then the phenomenon spreads rapidly: there is something outside that, once someone sees it, causes the mind to totally – and violently – snap, leading without fail to murder and/or suicide. Malorie, the main character, finds out she’s pregnant at the beginning of these events, and the story unfolds mostly from her perspective in a non-linear fashion: the tale begins after the world has been plunged into this nightmare for five years, and then alternates as Malorie remembers its origins and all of the major occurrences she experienced in the intervening years. Sometimes, the timeline is broken up in different chapters; sometimes, the first sentence of a chapter is in present time, and then immediately plunges into the past. It can be confusing, but on the plus side, this method of storytelling does lend itself very well to creating a story that is all about suspense and disorientation.
Her memories include her interactions with a small group of survivors, and it is those remembrances that give us insight into how the human psyche reacts in times of extreme stress and horror: there are those who step up and become leaders, those who follow along, and those who cunningly manipulate the more fragile minds.
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