The Bird Box

Bird Box by Josh Malerman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Creatures plague the world, creatures who anyone who gazes upon them insane. Can Mallorie, with Boy and Girl in tow, make her way to safety in a community down the river, while blindfolded?

This book has been a pretty big deal for a couple years. Richard hooked me up as an early birthday present. Thanks again, old sport.

I loved the core concept behind the book: Earth is overrun by creatures who cause suicidal insanity when anyone looks at them. People walk around blindfolded when they're outdoors to protect themselves and board up all of their windows to prevent accidentally seeing the creatures. As someone who had a lot of nightmares about creatures peering in my window as a kid, I was hooked right off the bat.

The way the story was told was also pretty cool, two threads in different time periods: Mallorie with her housemates and Mallorie after everything went to shit. It was interesting to see who Mallorie's life changed so much in a few years as the world outside continued to decay. The story itself was compulsively readable.

The reasons I didn't love the shit out of this were two-fold. The characters are wafer thin and are basically just names most of the time. Boy and Girl don't even get names until the end of the book. The second reason is that the writing style is fairly flavorless. There wasn't a time I felt like reading passages aloud to my wife or even thinking "That was clever" to myself.

Bird Box was an engaging read with a great concept but I don't think it lived up to its full potential. Three out of five stars.

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