Books to Die For

Josh Malerman's BIRD BOX

Imagine this: you can go outside but only blindfolded because something ilurking out there, beyond the threshold of your front door, will inexplicably drive you to madness, murder and suicide should you happen to gaze upon it - even just for a few seconds. Now imagine this threat lingering for years, until you've almost forgotten what trees, animals and the night sky look like.

This is the opening paragraph from my book feature (in Rue Morgue #146) on this week's Book to Die For, Josh Malerman's BIRD BOX. It's also an incredibly simple yet potent description of the circumstances Malerman's characters face in the novel. In the roughly year and a half since I spotlighted the author in the magazine, BIRD BOX has not only become a best seller in several countries, but has also picked up a number of award nominations, making it an excellent time to revisit it here.

"I've always been enamoured with the idea of man's inability to comprehend infinity," Malerman told me back in 2014. "If we can personify that idea as an actual creature that's outside the front door, or out on the porch, or standing on the front lawn, and you can go outside one day, but you may encounter infinity, that sounded interesting to me. But the way it's presented, I feel like it had to have been [inspired by] The Mist, or the Lovecraft overlapping of dimensions, that kind of thing."

Malerman's horror literacy shines through in BIRD BOX: the undescribed, unseen creatures are not the only interesting device employed in the narrative, which plays out in present tense as it follows main character Malorie both during the initial days and months of the invasion and events four years later. Just as the threat is claiming its first victims, Malorie discovers that she is pregnant; this greatly raises the stakes for the single, twentysomething woman as she attempts to keep herself and her fetus safe, first by holing up with her sister and later with a group of strangers.

In some ways, BIRD BOX is a siege story, but one almost entirely stripped of the popular conceit of the monsters trying to get in. Likewise, Malerman sidesteps the oft-used plot device of society attempting to exterminate the threat (be it through science or sheer force). Instead, the book find its horror in the acceptance of the fate that has befallen the Earth and the struggle of surviving amidst dwindling supplies, increasing hopelessness and the slowly festering insanity born from living in self-imposed captivity without daylight.

"The creatures are so ill-defined that the characters felt like to go after one, there was no leg to stand on, no purchase to go forward," explained Malerman. "It's not like, 'We know this one thing about them, so let's go for it!' They knew nothing about them. I think rather than hiding, it's more like, 'Which theory of ours are we all going to agree is the best one, and then we'll do something from there."

If you want to find out if the humans ever manage to best BIRD BOX's mysterious mind-destroying creatures, you can snag a print and/or digital copy of the novel for less than $15 on Amazon.