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Our Minds Have Ceilings

Author: Josh Malerman

Malorie’s world is collapsing. She is pregnant and single, living with her sister, trying to piece together the next steps. She doesn’t have time for the weird news stories, the sweeping paranoia, the plague of people going mad, becoming homicidal. She doesn’t have time for the apocalypse, until it comes to her door, and she is left alone, pregnant, and terrified.

There is only one common thread, one thing everyone can agree on. Before the madness overtakes you . . . you see something. No one knows what that something is, but it seems to be alive, and one glimpse is enough to unravel the human mind and leave the person suicidal. The only defense is in blindness, and so the survivors board up their world, paint their windows black, embrace blindfolds, and experiment. And, one by one, the experiments fail, and they die.

Malorie finds a group of enterprising survivors who are willing to take her in. For a moment, she has companionship, a sense of hope in amongst perpetual fear. But that’s before another survivor, Gary, arrives on their doorstep. This is a man who thinks they should open their eyes, and as Malorie inches closure to her delivery date, Gary’s dangerous secrets begin to spill out.

Told in alternating time periods, Bird Box is a psychological horror story that gets under your skin. What is that sound – the gentle crunch of a leaf floating to the ground or a creature sneaking up behind you, ready to rip off your blindfold and force you to see your doom? Was that knock at the door another terrified person seeking help, seeking community, or a man with a dangerous plan?

In the present day, we see Malorie once again alone, blindfolded, the mother of two young children simply called “girl” and “boy” traveling blindfolded up a river in desperation. In the past time, we see Malorie at the beginning of the end and in the house. Slowly, the two timelines weave together, depicting what happened and what could not be escaped.

Image by Andres Ospina from Pixabay

I first came to Bird Box through the Netflix movie, which I found intensely creative. The horror was not about what was seen, but about the possibilities of the unknown. The lack of answers, the very ambiguity of the creatures, was a powerful pull. At our most basic, our terrors in the dark are born out of imagination, out of not knowing. Malerman knows this, and both the book and the movie it spawned captured this subtly.

Like the movie, you will get no answers, but you will get many pulse pounding, intense moments of risk and fear and a lot of heartache. But, if you think you know the story from the movie, you’re not entirely correct. The book does have some differences, and these are enough to keep us wondering and engaged while still delivering the captivating atmosphere that made the movie an acclaimed success.

Malorie is an empathetic character, a woman who is believable in this situation. She resides somewhere between fear and duty, between the desire to hide and the strength to plan. These oscillating differences keep us grounded in this world gone mad and make us wonder – will anyone survive this new era where the only way to see is through carefully curated blindness? Highly recommended.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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