Bird Box

by Josh Malerman

293 pgs  (Bird Box series #1)

Most of the time, having really high expectations for a book means I'm going to be disappointed, at some level, with it when I read it. But sometimes a book comes along that is able to meet and even exceed my high expectations. Josh Malerman's Bird Box was one of those books. 

I haven't seen the Netflix movie based on the book, but I had definitely heard about it. So I had a pretty good idea of what the premise of the story was before I even read the cover flap. And the premise is what had me so excited to read the book. 

Malorie is a young mother in a post-apocalyptic future in which creatures exist that drive everyone who sees them to go violently insane and kill themselves. Malerman never makes it known where these creatures came from, what they look like, or what it is about them that causes such a deadly reaction.

It takes everything Malorie has just to survive every day and keep the two children alive. And the only way she's able to do that, is to black out all of their windows and wear a blindfold anytime she has to venture outside the house.

Bird Box the type of story that should be experienced for oneself and not spoiled by a review, so I won't say much more about it. Suffice it to say, it's intense and scary, in a way that will make the soles of your feet sweat. 

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Inspection

by Josh Malerman
387 pgs

Deep in the northern woods of Michigan, there's a tower, which serves as the home for 26 gifted 12-year-old boys, all of whom have been raised there since they were babies by a man they know only as D.A.D. The boys, whose names are simply the letters of the alphabet, have been raised their entire lives with no knowledge of the world outside their tower and beyond the grounds immediately surrounding it. Unbeknownst to them, they are the subjects of a bizarre and unsettling experiment. D.A.D. believes that "genius is distracted by the opposite sex," and so is raising these boys without any knowledge that females exist, believing that by doing so, he will help them to unlock their full potential.

While these boys have been growing up in their tower, being taught by special teachers, and reading books and watching movies made specifically for them to reinforce the idea of a one-gender world, a similar experiment has been going on in a separate tower a few miles away. Only in this tower, there are 26 girls, being raised by M.O.M. with no knowledge of the male gender.

But these children are all extremely gifted, and for M.O.M. and D.A.D. to assume they will never figure out something is wrong with the world they've been raised in is naive. In fact, a boy named J has recently begun to suspect that D.A.D. has been hiding something from them, and a girl named K has been bothered by something she thinks she's seen off in the distance, something that doesn't seem right.

Inspection is the second book by Josh Malerman that I've read, and they've both made me excited about him as an author. I've yet to read his breakout book Bird Box. But with its sequel scheduled to be coming out in October, I plan to read it soon. I'm looking forward to both books and I'm pretty confident I'm going to enjoy them even more than I have these first two.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

On This, the Day of the Pig

by Josh Malerman
286 pgs

I have not watched Bird Box, nor have I read Josh Malerman's book, which it was based on. But unless you've been living under a rock for the past few months, it's impossible not to know the basic premise of the story, or to be aware of the hype it generated. That being said, when I came across Malerman's On This, the Day of the Pig, I initially didn't give it much consideration. It wasn't until I made the connection and realized who Malerman was, that I decided to give it a try.

In a nutshell, consider how Animal Farm would have been different had Stephen King written it instead of George Orwell. That gives you a general idea of what you're in for with this one.

Pearl is a pig. He's an old and slightly deformed pig, and he's avoided farmer Kopple's slaughtering axe longer than any pig that's ever been on the farm before. But that's not just a coincidence. There's something different about Pearl, something not quite right. And anyone who has ever been around him has sensed it. It's not just that one of his eyes is so dark it looks like he has a gaping hole where the eye should be. It's the thoughts that come into your mind when you're around Pearl...almost as if the pig could communicate directly with and control your mind.

On This, the Day of the Pig feels a little bit like a throwback to the horror books written in the 80s, and on the surface, it sounds a little campy. But Malerman does a great job of infusing real creepiness into the story, and I found myself struggling to put it down.

I'll definitely be reading more by him, and sooner rather than later.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆