Bird Box isn’t about coming to terms with the creatures or finding their weaknesses and learning to fight back, like the very similar horror story A Quiet Place. No one can say what the creatures are or find a way to fight them, since even a brief glance at them destroys the viewer’s mind. The afflicted murder everyone around them, or self-destruct in horrific ways. From somewhere, “creatures” arrive, and everyone who looks at them goes insane. The rush to action is only the first of many aspects of Malorie that makes it feel as much like a screenplay for a Bird Box movie sequel as a novel in its own right.īird Box lays out a normal world turned abnormal in an instant. Malorie continues the Bird Box story, but skips past any sense of setup to lunge into that moment where the protagonists’ world collapses and they’re dumped back into urgent, severe danger.

When Susanne Bier’s film adaptation, starring Sandra Bullock, came out on Netflix and rapidly became one of the service’s all-time top 10 most-watched movies, a sequel seemed inevitable. There isn’t much drama in survivors sitting hunkered down in a secure place for long periods, unless they bring that drama into their cloisters with them.Īuthor Josh Malerman clearly understands this dynamic, but it’s still startling both how rapidly and how often he puts it into effect in Malorie, the sequel to his 2014 horror novel Bird Box. The cycle can go on endlessly, as long as the audience is willing to tune in, but over time, it can become maddeningly repetitive. Anybody who’s watched or read The Walking Dead knows the familiar beats of a long-running story set in an ongoing apocalypse: the protagonists find safety, lose it to catastrophe, then struggle to find new safety, only to lose that again as well.

Josh malerman