Review: Bird Box

Bird Box by Josh Malerman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This review is also found on Goodreads! :)

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What's scarier than desolation you cannot see, and destructive madness you cannot fight nor unsee?

This book is bone-chilling and terrifying. Usually, if weekdays are swamped, I finish a book during weekends when there's peace, my favorite chair to settle into, and no internet connection. With this book, that didn't happen. I had to take several weekends, because it got too frightening to the point that I kept imagining creatures staring at me through my windows while I read, willing me to look at them.

This book isn't for the faint-hearted. It's violently graphic, and unbearably maddening. I cannot imagine living life the way Malorie did. Having the freedom of looking at the world and going deranged because of it. Having your freedom to see snatched away from you by unnatural creatures absolutely unaware of the damage they do to the world. The absolute hopelessness of their circumstances was perfectly delivered because this book offers no answers about these lethal creatures--how they came nor what they are, and how to defeat them.

Malerman wrote madness with unnerving authenticity. He's in perfect command over his story. You almost believe these creatures are real and lurking around you. I felt the madness as it consumed each character. And yet, I also felt a different kind of madness inflicted on Malorie--the kind not brought on by the creatures, but from the profound agony living in a world that consumes your frailty; a world that leaves you with nothing but pain. I felt her give up (I think I gave up even before she did), and I also felt how she held on to the voices to push through the hysteria.

Be warned, you will finish this book with a lot of questions. Like I've said, Malerman doesn't provide a lot of answers; but the lack of it feels right. He wouldn't provide you with a resolution or an explanation for every "what happened to [insert name or thing here]" and "how do they...", which makes it even more frightening; leaving it like that for his reader's imagination to feast on.

I have never been so scared of a book before as I have been with Bird Box.

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