Ah, the post-apocalypse. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the influence of post-apocalyptic stories is ubiquitous in our present-day culture, and writers, game designers, and screenwriters continue to come up with compelling new twists on life after the collapse of civilization following nuclear war, viral outbreaks, etc. Josh Malerman, the lead singer in a Michigan rock band known as High Strung, tries something different with his debut novel, Bird Box, in which the world goes to hell in a hand basket as a result of something that has been moving around the globe, causing all those who see it to become violently insane (including animals). To combat this threat, survivors nail blankets and boards across windows and shield their eyes with blindfolds, their hands, or just simply closing their eyes as they pick their way through the empty streets and houses. It’s an interesting premise, trying to cope with something that drives you insane if you take even a single glance at it, but there are parts of the book where the reader’s requirement to suspend their disbelief comes under a lot of strain.
First, the story. The protagonist is Malorie, a young woman who cares for two children (whom she has, for some reason, named only “Boy” and “Girl”) through a mixture of love and harsh action intended to keep them alive. She and the two children are the only survivors of a group of people with whom she took shelter in the days following the appearance of whatever caused this apocalypse. When we meet her, Malorie makes the fateful decision to blindfold herself and the children and to undertake a harrowing journey up a nearby river to a place of refuge. On the way, she reminisces on the early days of the collapse, her experiences with her fellow survivors, and encounters with those driven mad by whatever is outside.
While the book is well-written, it suffers from a jagged pace. The chapters jar the reader from past to future to past again, like a highly unstable episode of Lost, and the use of the river as the characters’ pathway is problematic. Every path in a story is laden with obstacles that the characters have to overcome, but in the case of this story, you have three blindfolded people in a boat on a river, and the only way to really generate those obstacles is if they were to accidentally hit a bank, get snagged on something, or run into someone else on the water. While these things do occur, they strain believability because of what happens during these instances.
The encounter with an insane man on a boat, for example, started out as being entirely plausible. It is scary and fraught with tension, especially since the man in the boat is edging closer to the protagonists’ and yelling for them to take their blindfolds off. He gets close enough to their boat and then threatens to remove their blindfolds for them, and then…doesn’t. After Malorie screams at him to leave, he actually does leave, which made no sense to me. If Malorie somehow knocked him off the boat and started rowing like hell, that would have been more believable than the man simply taking off in his boat when there would have been nothing to stop him from doing what he was threatening to do. What amazes me is that this happens not once, but twice, throughout the course of the book. Needless to say, this does not do the book any favors in the believability department.
This is a shame, because the characters are well-realized, the threat to their lives is frightening, and overall, Malerman’s use of language and writing techniques is superb. Bird Box is by no means a bad book, but I hope that in his future literary endeavors, Josh Malerman makes his work more believable.
The Eclectic Post-Dispatch 