Bird Box is a post-apocalyptic horror novel that’ll keep you up all night after you’ve finished the book – in terror. In this book there are things out there that you cannot see, that you MUST not see. If you venture outside without a blindfold, you will see “it” and “it” will see you, and you’ll die from your own hand. Whatever it is, it causes instant madness – homicidal and suicidal tendencies. Learn to listen, and wear a blindfold.
Bird Box flips between present day and the start of the apocalypse. At the beginning, Malorie is newly pregnant. But she can’t celebrate because of strange new occurrences that have been gripping the world. People are dying in strange ways. Sane and normal people are suddenly becoming violent and killing themselves. What began as a few freak instances becomes global phenomena. People eventually came to the conclusion that the afflicted had seen something that made them go crazy. People bar their doors and block their windows, society stops, the last radio show host kills himself on air, and soon there is nothing but a few survivors. Something is out there. But no one who has seen it has lived to tell the tale.
Malorie finds a group of survivors early on and stays with them inside a self-sufficient home with power, heat, and lights. They take part in daily chores, ritualistically call random phone numbers to reach anyone, go outside with a blindfold to fetch water, and generally try to stay alive. For months, her belly grows and their food supply dwindles. When a stranger shows up at the door out of the blue, a giant shift is created in the household dynamics.
In present day, Malorie has two children. She has been waiting for them to be old enough. She has trained them to use their hearing, to be competent without sight. This was the day for their journey. The present-day situation takes place in one day where Malorie leads her children on a dangerous journey downriver in a canoe, blindfolded the entire time. We switch back and forth from this day to the past to find out what, exactly, has led to this journey – and why.
There is something out there on the river with Malorie and the children, and they know it. They can hear it. Death is all around them.
I haven’t had nightmares this bad from a book in a long time. When everything is left to your imagination, things can get pretty scary. That’s what’s so brilliant about this book. It leaves everything to your imagination, and the horror your imagination can conceive is a million times worse than anything you can see in writing. If you love horror, Bird Box should be your next go-to book.
