Bird Box
Ratings289
Average rating3.9
Years removed from my initial watch of Bird Box (the film), I wanted to sit down and give this a try. I liked it, and I thought it was tense and so miserable in places that I had to take a breath to keep going, which is good! And in other places, I found myself struggling to not start skimming. It's good, but it definitely lags in the “past” timeline chapters, and I think that some of the emotional beats were a tad repetitive without adding too much new. Wouldn't read it again, but definitely better than the movie.
Flat characters, massive plot holes and contradictions. And for some reason the only death described is that of a dog?
I believe there would've been potential for better, as the idea is really interesting, but it feels like the author focused more on building a timeline than giving the characters any depth or creating consistency.
The movie, in this case, works better and takes less time off your life!
Contains spoilers
solid reread
Can't remember if they put the umbilical cord hanging in the movie though? The dramatics of the birthing scene is just top tier
OG review from 2017: I am so incredibly in love with this book. From the very beginning pages I felt in tune with all the characters, and was immersed in their lives. I finished this book in one day and the brief moments when I paused in between chapters I had to remind myself that my world is still normal and I am not indeed, tucked away in a house with blankets or cardboards covering up my windows. And for an author to make me feel like I'm in a different reality when I break away from the pages, is an author that I admire. I can't wait to share with all my friends of this amazing read. I would recommend to absolutely anybody even if a suspense based novel isn't your typical genre. If I could, I'd give it more than 5 stars.
I never watched the movie, but heard the book was waaaaay better (again on youtube), and it was!!
Maravilhoso! Muito melhor que o filme, nos faz ver imagens sem ser excessivamente descritivo. E dá medo!
Do you know about Libby? Perfect library app to listen to for bedtime story fun. I know I saw this movie, but didn't remember anything other than Sandy B being mean to her kids and wondering why she didn't name them anything other than Boy and Girl. Apparently they need to fear you to do what you say. All said and done, totally acceptable bed time story via audiobook.
I enjoyed this. I've been in a reading slump so this book was refreshing since I had the constant need to pick it up. It was a pretty quick read, to the point where I was confused at how it was going to end since there wasn't much left in the book. The writing was very atmospheric, the overall book was creepy not really scary but I didn't mind that.
I wish we had gotten an explanation for how this all started just because that's the type of person I am, but I understand why there wouldn't be one... that's life after all.
I think I will be thinking about this book for some time to come.
I had so much fun reading this. It's kind of hard to review because there were some head-scratchingly confusing things that happened but also some truly creepy things too. I guess it's sort of somewhere between B Horror and early 2000s PG-13 horror.
Anyway, this could've been a single-session type read. It's short and mostly to the point.
And, to be extremely honest, finding out that Malerman released a sequel after I had already finished kind of ruined the ending for me. Not that that spoils anything, just that I felt like this should have been a single book.
I'm only a few pages in, but I can't get past her as a mother calling them Boy and Girl. Maybe post-apocalyptic fiction isn't for me.
It was probably not the best idea to read this in the waning days of 2020. Several sentences were strikingly prescient of a pandemic.
Its not often I read a book where you get grabbed roughly in the first couple of paragraphs and then forcefully dragged along until the very end. Starting this on a Sunday afternoon meant I was missing some serious sleep on Monday morning. :)
I am an odd fan of horror, if you can actually call me that. The usual horror tropes I find to be dull, boring, unimaginative, and frankly an insult to my intelligence most of the time. I think its because they tend to lean too heavily on the tropes without adding any creativity to the mix.
Someone passing out or dying from fright because they are in a graveyard (yes I have read this!) makes me roll my eyes. I spent a good chunk of my childhood family vacations in county court houses and graveyards because my mother was into genealogy. I played games among the headstones. They are not scary or spooky. They are calm, peaceful, and somewhat sad.
Death and the dead do not frighten me. I have sat by too many death beds in my lifetime. I have held the hands of dead family members, kissed their cheeks before the coffin lids were closed.
I know exactly what the skin of a corpse feels like. Death is not scary, it is just sad.
I am not afraid of ghosts, goblins, demons, or similar. Maybe its my SF/F background where those very types of characters can be the PoV/heroes.
Monsters: if it can be identified, it can be defeated. Period. Maybe its the SF/F background again.
So yeah, assuming I will get all scared and similar because a demon popped up in the middle of the room . . . sorry ain't enough for me. My first reaction is, well is it going to do anything? Perhaps its its turn to buy drinks? In my opinion its a very lazy author who assumes something will be frightening or unsettling or spooky all by itself with no effort on their end.
Bird Box is NOT one of these books. Nothing is visible. Nothing is identified. Nothing is known. All we see are the effects, what happens to the people who see . . . something. Something which drives them utterly insane, to murder, to suicide.
Its the terror of the unknown. The claustrophobic environment. Keep your doors closed and locked. Keep your windows closed, blinds closed, drapes closed, blocked by cardboard and wood and beds and anything else that can be found. Keep your eyes closed.
Hunger, exhaustion, loneliness, fear. Terror of the unknown, the undefined, the unknowable. Now that can be scary, that can be spooky.
Now imagine being a mother with 2 small children all alone in this environment. That is terrifying.
This book is excellent.
It delivers exactly what a psychological thriller should– a sense of creepiness while also managing to keep the reader on their toes throughout the entire novel.
I'll be honest when I say that the Netflix adaptation does not do this book proper justice. There are simply emotions and events that occur in this book that cannot be translated into film.
I'm so glad I picked this up this year, but I'll admit that I am a little worried that the sequel simply won't be able to deliver since I have such high expectations for it now!
I don't know how to review this. I don't typically do horror, because I'm a big ol' fraidy cat, and monsters that cause insanity and suicide/homicide if you look at them is a far cry from romance novels and nonfiction (my typical fare lately).
Ironically, there are a lot of parallels of this book to the pandemic (changing behavior based on this thing you don't understand, avoiding leaving the house unless it's absolutely necessary), and in that sense, now was kind of the perfect time to read it. Thanks book club, for spending five years joking about picking this book and then finally actually selecting it now.
This was definitely scary, but it was more psychological and atmospheric than jump-scary. But I also read it in two days, so clearly I was pretty riveted. There are quite a lot of descriptions of people succumbing to violent deaths, but most of the time they are not happening actively, so much as the main characters (housemates) discovering what's happening in the outside world by listening to radio or TV news reports, while they can still access those resources. The characterization of the housemates was great, their blindfolded forays into the yard or outside the neighborhood were always grip-the-edge-of-your-seat suspenseful, and maybe the most horrifying thing to realize is that, at some point, the main characters try to call 9-1-1, hospitals, a funeral home, numbers at random hoping that ANYONE will pick up — and you realize that no one is there, no one is coming to save them, no one CAN save them. Survive on your own or don't.
(From the beginning of the book, we know the main character, Malorie, is pregnant, and I think it needs to be said that nothing bad happens to any babies while they are still in utero.)
Bird Box is the hit I never saw coming. Even though I didn't go into it blind, having already caught the Bird Box madness when Netflix released their film adaptation, I nevertheless found reading the book to be a worthwhile experience. Malorie proved to be a compelling character who managed to overcome my initial unfavorable impression as the book progressed. There's something frightening about what is unseen and unknown. There's also some frustrating in reading a book about mysterious creatures and having those remain remain unknown and unexplained the whole time. I'm hoping to learn more about the creatures in the sequel. One of my complaints about the film was this lack of clarity about the creatures, and the book did little to clear it up. That's not to say that Malerman's book has no surprises for those who've seen the film, but in this particular respect no additional explanation was offered. I enjoyed the dark tone of the book, and found the idea of what people will do in order to survive to be especially relevant today. Highly recommend. Read the book and watch the movie.
WOW!!!! This is such a well written horror book!!!! I don't say this lightly, but this book made me actually afraid!!! Which, at this point, is pretty hard to do because of the amount of horror media I've consumed since I was about 4 years old. This is just SO FANTASTIC!!!! If you can handle horror books, you should ABSOLUTELY read this!!!!! It is one Hell of a terrifying story, mostly because of how little you know!!!!!
Such a wonderful book. The movie didn't do it justice.
It's one of my favourite books that crafts a survival tale in an unrealistic scenario into something insanely realistic. It's no doubt that it's hard to convince a reader to fear a being we cannot see, and this book easily accomplishes it. It adds something special by filling the book with human perspective, and showing us how different characters might interact with an unknown entity. The author lets every character shine regardless of their personality.
At the end of the day, do you fear a creature that drives you insane or do you fear the insane for what they might do to you?
1: Bird Box ★★★★★
#2: Malorie ★★.5
This review can also be found on my blog.
How do I begin to review Bird Box? First published five years ago and probably one of the most hyped horror novels in recent memory, I had sky high expectations going in. And somehow Josh Malerman managed to exceed every single one. I think we all know how difficult it can be to write five-star reviews that are not just “I adored it” ad nauseam, but I'm going to give it my best shot.
This is truly one of the most creative, original pieces of horror media I have ever consumed. I'm sure many are familiar with the concept at this point: a post-apocalyptic world in which creatures roam the Earth who will end your life if you set eyes upon them. The Netflix adaptation led to criticisms that the plot was too similar to A Quiet Place for comfort, but obviously this novel debuted long before the aforementioned film.
You are saving their lives for a life not worth living.
Malerman is able to use this kind of environment to his advantage, building up a level of tension I'm not sure I've experienced in a novel before. I was literally on the edge of my seat and there was a moment or two where I actually jerked in surprise. Aside from the atmosphere, it was incredibly interesting to see what the characters would come up with in order to navigate this new world.
The characters themselves were honestly forgettable, but that didn't matter much to me. All of the novel's other merits more than made up for it. When I think back on this, I don't expect to remember how much I loved the characters, but how much I loved the atmosphere and the writing itself. That being said, I did think the exploration of Malorie's motherhood was interesting. She is often asking herself whether she is a good mother, and it's a difficult question to answer. In trying to protect her children, she must also do things she probably never imagined she would.
How can she expect her children to dream as big as the stars if they can't lift their heads to gaze upon them? Malorie doesn't know the answer.
TL;DR: This was a tense, legitimately scary novel that I'll be recommending to all horror fans.
More of a 1.5
Flat characters, overly simplistic writing, predictable plot that had one of the most unsatisfying and boring endings I've ever read, and the past timeline was more interesting than the current plot. Honestly one of the worst thrillers I've ever read.
Have you ever read a book that started out so promising, only to slowly fizzle out as it went? That's sadly how I feel about Bird Box. It took me a while to finally pick this up. I like to let the hype about things die down first, so I can really immerse myself and see how I feel. In this case, I'm kind of disappointed with what I found. I'm all for suspending disbelief while reading. I'll believe anything you tell me to, as long as it makes sense to the overall story and has enough toeholds to keep me hanging on. Bird Box just left me floating out there in ether.
For a story that focuses so heavily on the inability to see, there wasn't a whole lot of description of the other senses. It was all so vague, with Mallory only occasionally mentioning slight sounds every now and then. Plus I had the hardest time with Mallory as a character anyway, so that made things rough. She is SHRILL. Oh how shrill she was. Maybe it was the audio book I was listening to, but her inability to calm down and assess situations drove me nuts. I think it was meant to build tension. In fact, I could see the effort there. All it did was make me want to draw some duct tape across her mouth and walk away. Harsh? Perhaps. All true though.
Add in the fact that the timeline jumping was a little confusing, and the fact that the ending just kind of WAS, and you have a story that I am ambivalent about.
I ended up being quite conflicted about this one - the writing was quite sparse but lent itself well to the story, the characters weren't overly likeable but it worked in the context of the plot, the fact we never got a proper explanation drove me mad but also worked well in terms of mystery and atmosphere. See, totally conflicting!!
All in all I did enjoy it and read it fairly quickly but I don't think it's one which will stay with me or that I'll reread. I also watched the Netflix film just after and thought it was not the best, a lot had been changed and the pacing was awful! As usual the book was better!
You always have to be careful with your expectations when starting a book because a book can either meet them, fall short of them, or exceed them, so it is best you go in with no expectations at all. I, of course, had expectations, I had heard reviews and seen the movie trailer. For the longest time, I had an urge to read this book because it sounded good, but I hadn't read this book because it sounded scary and I don't do scary. But well I saw the movie trailer (Sandra Bullock!), and then the Kindle edition went on sale for $2.99 US. So I told myself if you can get through the book then maybe you can watch the movie.
The premise of Bird Box is scary. A mother of two four-year-old children has to make it 20 miles down a river to a haven blindfolded because if she opens her eyes, she will see something that will make her kill those closest to her and then herself. We don't know what this thing is but its real and it's out there.
Luckily for me, this book wasn't as scary as I thought it was going to be, but that was also the disappointing part. I could have read this book a long time ago. I never really cared all that much about the characters, we didn't learn much about them before the Problem starting. I didn't need to see their lives before the timeline in the book but other than Tom we never learned much about their back story including Malorie's and she's the main character. I mean I don't need to like a character, but I have to them interesting and to find them interesting I need to know about them. I would have loved to learn more about Cheryl and Felix and Jules, even Don. I wanted to understand more of why he was the way he was. In survivor horror, I liked learning what makes a character tick and seeing how people react to situations differently especially since the real danger isn't what you cannot see but how people act when they do see whatever is outside.
There were a few creepy moments in this book it did have me compelled to finish it because I needed to know what happened at the end, but it didn't get GOOD for me until the last twenty per cent.