1The children sleep under domes of chicken wire draped in black cloth, so that even in the dark there is nothing for their eyes to land on. Wires run from under the back door to amplifiers beside their mattresses, carrying every scrape and footfall in the yard. One October morning, in a suburb of Detroit, their mother decides that a fog outside might hide them, and she wakes them to leave. She drills them before they go: blindfolds on, no talking across the boat, listen past the water and into the woods. Each instruction ends with the same question, and the two four-year-olds answer it in turn, one word each, like soldiers. Bird Box by Josh Malerman opens with a woman about to row twenty miles blind, and with a line of rules the reader is expected to learn as fast as the children did.
How the Bird Box Rules Work
The premise is simple to state and impossible to explain, which is the point. Something has arrived in the world. Nobody knows what it is, only that a single sight of it sends a person into violent madness that ends, almost always, in suicide. So people board their windows, tape cardboard over the glass and go outside only with their eyes covered.
Malerman tells the story in three strands. The first is the river journey, set across a single day in the present tense. The second follows Malorie four and a half years earlier, newly pregnant, as the reports spread out of Russia and she ends up at a safe house in a town called Riverbridge with a handful of strangers. The third, folded into the river chapters as memory, covers the years she spent alone raising the children. The title of Bird Box by Josh Malerman refers to a box of birds hung beside the front door as an alarm, because they chatter whenever anything comes near.
A Horror Novel Written for the Ears
What the structure is really doing is keeping the reader blindfolded too. The creatures are never described, because nobody who sees one lives to say. Everything that matters arrives as a noise: a splash beside the hull, wet feet behind someone on the grass, a dog that will not stop barking at a covered window. Bird Box by Josh Malerman makes you listen the way its characters must, and your imagination supplies the rest, which is far worse than any monster on the page.
The alternating chapters are short, often only a few pages, and nearly every one ends on a held breath before cutting to the other timeline. It is a cheap trick done extremely well. You know from the opening that Malorie is alone with the children years later, so the house chapters carry a slow-burning question about what happened to everyone else in them.
What works
- The children’s training is the most disturbing thing in it. Malorie has raised them to name sounds in sequence, and the Boy can recite forty or fifty of her movements around the house, unintentional ones included. They can tell from her breathing whether she is smiling. It is a superpower and a wound at once.
- The house’s experiments carry real menace. George, the dead owner, tested a theory with a video camera, and Tom tells that story in the cellar. Later Tom and Jules walk the block blind looking for dogs, and what they find in the houses on their own street is among the grimmest pages in the book.
- The engineering is lovingly specific. Tom, a tinkerer who cannot leave a problem alone, measures his stride to a pop song so that he can walk three miles by count, and trains huskies as Seeing Eye dogs. Every small solution makes the world feel more real.
- The climax is crosscut with nerve. The final house sequence runs two crises at once in near darkness, and Malerman controls it superbly.
Where It Gives Ground
- The housemates are sketches. Beyond Tom, the people in the house are a job and a single trait each: the angry one, the young one, the dog owner. Olympia, the other expectant mother, is written as a wide-eyed naif and little more.
- The trouble is signposted. In Bird Box by Josh Malerman the two characters who will cause harm are flagged from their first scenes, so a reader keeps waiting for the obvious to happen.
- The style leans on volume. Italic inner voices, repeated phrases and capital letters stand in for escalating panic, and by the fourth or fifth use they read as a writer turning the dial rather than earning it.
- The arrival is rushed. After so much patience, the last chapter introduces a whole new situation and a moral shock in a few pages, then closes before it can be felt.
Read These Next
If Bird Box by Josh Malerman suits you, there are more Halloween classics on our shelf, and these follow the same nerve:
- Blindness by José Saramago, the literary cousin, where a society loses its sight and its decency together.
- The Stand by Stephen King, for a world emptied by catastrophe and the strangers who band together after it.
- Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, a gentler collapse told across time, with the same pull between before and after.
- The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, for horror that lives inside a house and its people’s nerves.
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a parent and child on a brutal journey through a ruined country.
- Malorie by Josh Malerman, the 2020 sequel, which picks up the family’s story years later.
About Josh Malerman and Some Bird Box Trivia
Josh Malerman is a Michigan writer and a working musician, and Bird Box was the first of his novels to be published. He drafted it years before it appeared, and it set the pattern for a career in strange, high-concept horror: Black Mad Wheel, Unbury Carol, Inspection, Daphne and Incidents Around the House followed, along with the sequel. Bird Box by Josh Malerman remains the book most readers find first.
- It reached British shops before American ones: Harper Voyager published it on 27 March 2014, and Ecco followed in the US that May.
- Universal optioned the film rights in 2013, before publication, with Andy Muschietti attached to direct at one stage.
- It was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel and shortlisted for the James Herbert Award, and it was named a Michigan Notable Book in 2015.
- Netflix’s 2018 film starred Sandra Bullock, was directed by Susanne Bier from a script by Eric Heisserer, and Netflix claimed 45 million accounts watched it in its first week.
- Malerman has said he worried The Happening and the film of The Road would make his book look like a copy, though his draft came first.
The Last Word
Its weaknesses are real, and they show most in the people: too many of them exist to fill a room, and the two who matter most to the plot announce themselves early. But the central idea is one of the great horror premises of the century, and Bird Box by Josh Malerman executes it with a discipline that never lets you look. The book trusts the dark.
Read it in a quiet room. You will notice every sound in the house.
