Fingers in eyes and fingers down throats and the cracking of a bone and the tearing of what sounds like a throat.” For large portions of the book, however, we’re firmly inside the characters’ heads, and I couldn’t help finding that this slowed the pace of what was already a rather straightforward narrative. The first scene is absolutely breakneck, Malerman managing to describe an outbreak of madness as experienced by a blindfolded person: “It’s not difficult to put visual images with the sounds they make. The reader is kept off-guard, forced to look for clues about this world and assess the validity of different characters’ perception of its threats. We’re told there are no recorded instances of a creature forcing a human to look at them, but it’s little comfort when a blind woman can be driven mad, or children are driven to suicide in a totally dark house. They take up more space.” Beyond that, the “rules” surrounding the creatures seem uneasily malleable. We’re told that they’ve tripled since arriving, and in a particularly horribly suggestive bit of description, “they’re not necessarily taller than they were before… but wider. Malerman excels in continually teasing that the reader will learn more about the mysterious creatures. The book starts with a terrifying breach of those rules – a blind woman is driven mad, which previously required perception by sight – and Malorie responds by adaptation: she and her children cover their skin with hoodies and gloves to prevent the creatures touching them. So much of its tension and sense of threat comes from an appreciation of Bird Box‘s visceral mayhem (particularly the destruction of the safe house at the hands of the sinister intruder Gary), and that Malorie has only survived by slavish adherence to the “rules” of this narrative universe.

Although technically it might be possible to read Malorie as a stand-alone novel, I wouldn’t recommend it.

Malorie josh malerman