Bird Box

by Josh Malerman

[leahrosereads]

Oh BIRD BOX why do you have to make me a bad guy?

This just wasn’t the horror book for me. I was duped by the hype and all the amazing reviews, and I though this is it, this is going to be the first fantastic horror of the year. I’m so ready! But it wasn’t. And that’s a damn shame, because I wanted it so bad.

The concept was fucking brilliant! A (post apocalyptic-y) world where there’s something so terrifying or unnatural wandering around that once seen causes people to go bat shit crazy and violent, and no one knows anything about them/it/???? Oh, I’m here for that! For sure. Unfortunately, the execution doesn’t match what sounded like a sure-thing in horror.

Let’s start with writing. It was simplistic sentence structure after simplistic sentence structure. It sometimes read as though we were in the mind of a child, but we were actually following around an adult woman. It was awkward and disjointed and not my usual preference in writing style.

The adult woman we were following, Malorie…oh Malorie. I know I was supposed to like you, empathize with you, sympathize for you, and want you to succeed and survive, but I didn’t. This is most definitely because of the writing. There was not enough investment in any of the characters, even the one the reader was following for most of the book.

The secondary characters, including the housemates were just there. They didn’t matter at all to me, and again, it’s because there was no substance to make me care about the severity of their situation.

But where this writing is almost negligent is the fact that I gave zero fucks about 2 four year old children?!?! What the fuck Josh Malerman? What the fuck. This isn’t on me. I tear up during songs/news stories/books/movies/etc. there’s a mother’s struggle with children. Those stories tear me to shreds, usually. But again, the writing didn’t give enough for me to give back emotionally.

The writing didn’t do the characters justice, and it didn’t do the plot any good either. Because there wasn’t enough details/driving points/whatever anywhere in this book, I just went from page to page, almost clinically because there was nothing. No suspense, no build up, no tense situations (even though there were places where it was supposed to be), because the writing didn’t give anything to those parts.

So really, we’re kinda sticking with the writing. I think if there had been more to this story, a lot of my issues with the characters and plot would fix themselves. It was under 300 pages. Maybe it need to be twice its size to really live up to the potential of the concept. But, it’s currently just my first disappointing read of 2018.