Josh Malerman wrote Bird Box while touring as the frontman of a rock band, in vans and hotel rooms, and it sat unpublished for years alongside a dozen other completed novels before anyone bought it.
That’s the useful fact about him, because it explains the shape of the career. He had a large backlog when he arrived, he writes extremely fast, and the result is a catalog that is both prolific and wildly uneven. Among the Josh Malerman books there are three or four genuinely excellent ones and a great many that read like a very good idea executed at speed.
What the Josh Malerman books do better than almost anything else on the shelf is premise. A world where seeing something makes you kill yourself. A boys’ home where the outside world is a lie. A town where a thing hides in the corner of your eye. The ideas are consistently better than anything else on the shelf, and the execution is the variable.
He is still the frontman of the band. He writes with the album playing.
I haven’t read these. What follows is the critical consensus.
Fiction by René Rehn
The Short Version
Read Bird Box. It’s the reason he has a career and the mechanism at the center of it is one of the best in modern horror.
Then Malorie if you want the sequel, or Goblin if you want the most atmospheric one.
The Essential
Bird Box (2014)
Something has appeared in the world. Anyone who sees it is driven immediately and violently to suicide, and nobody knows what it is because looking is fatal.
Malorie has spent four years in a boarded-up house with two children she has trained since birth to listen, and the novel alternates between that period and a single day: rowing twenty miles down a river, blindfolded, with both children, toward somewhere that may not exist.
The mechanism is what everyone rightly praises. The horror is never described, because describing it would require somebody to have seen it, so the entire novel is written around a hole. Every scene is constructed from sound, touch and the terror of an open window. It’s a formal constraint that generates real dread rather than merely being clever.
On two things nearly everyone agrees: the tension is extraordinary, and the ending divides people. The 2018 Netflix film made it a phenomenon and is considerably less frightening than the book.
Also on sci-fi horror.
Malorie (2020)
Twelve years after Bird Box. Malorie and the two children, now teenagers, are living in an abandoned summer camp, and she has raised them under a discipline so total that neither has seen anything since they were four.
Then a man arrives with a census list of survivors, and two of the names on it are her parents.
The sequel’s actual subject is what she did to the children in order to keep them alive. Tom is sixteen and wants to build things, to experiment with visors and filters, to find out whether the rules can be tested. Olympia has been reading books she was not supposed to have. And Malorie’s rules are absolute and were correct and are now the thing damaging them.
The train sequence in the middle is genuinely tense.
The fair verdict: a good sequel to a book that needed none, justified mostly by the argument between Malorie and Tom.
A House at the Bottom of a Lake (2016)
This is the one I’ve read, and I’m going to disagree with almost everybody about it.
Two teenagers on a first date take a canoe across three connected lakes and find a house, fully furnished and intact, sitting at the bottom of the third one. They keep going back, diving into it room by room across a summer.
It is not a horror novel. It has liminal flavor, and there are some ghostly elements, and the image at the center is genuinely good. But the book is a romance. It is about two people falling in love in an unusual place, and the unusual place is the setting rather than the subject.
It’s also slow. It meanders, very little happens, and at a hundred and fifty pages that shouldn’t be possible.
It gets recommended constantly by people who have read all of Malerman, and I understand why: the premise is his best and the restraint is deliberate. But if you have come here wanting to be frightened, this will not do it, and I’d rather say so than pass along a recommendation I don’t agree with.
Read it if you want a strange, quiet love story with an extraordinary setting. Do not read it for scares.
The Rest Worth Naming
Inspection (2019)
Twenty-six boys are raised in a tower in a forest by a man they call D.A.D., who has told them there are no women anywhere in the world.
Elsewhere, twenty-six girls are raised in an identical tower by M.O.M.
The premise is that the experiment tests whether removing all knowledge of the opposite sex produces greater intellectual output, and the boys are being trained as prodigies. Then one of them sees something in the trees.
What makes it work is the inspections themselves. Every boy is examined daily, in detail, for any sign of what the staff call Rotten Tree, and the examination is described enough times that the reader understands what a childhood of it does.
The novel’s weakness is the second half, where the two towers meet and the plot becomes conventional.
The first hundred and fifty pages are the best sustained thing Malerman has written and the closed-world detail is superb.
Goblin (2017)
Six novellas set in the same town, which is perpetually raining, has a police force with unusual powers, and does not appear on maps.
“A Man in Slices” is a man proving his love by removing parts of himself. “Kamp” is a man who has been terrified of ghosts since childhood attempting to cure himself by spending a night in the town’s worst house. “Happy Birthday, Hunter” is a big-game hunter pursuing the one animal in the Great Northern Forest he has never taken, which is protected by law for reasons nobody explains.
They connect loosely: a character crosses into another story, an event is mentioned twice, and the rain runs through all of it.
“Presto” and “A Mix-Up at the Zoo” are the weaker two.
It began as a limited-edition small-press object and was reissued in 2021, and it’s the best entry point to Malerman for readers who found Bird Box thin.
Unbury Carol (2018)
Carol Evers has a condition. Several times in her life she has fallen into a coma indistinguishable from death, lasting days, during which she is fully conscious and can hear everything.
Three people know. Her husband Dwight is one of them, and when it happens again he decides to bury her.
The setting is the invention. It is a western, with outlaws and a trail and a town, in a world that is not quite the American West and is never explained, and the outlaw who comes for Carol is a man called Smoke who sets people on fire.
The premature burial premise is Poe’s and Malerman uses it properly, which means the sections from inside the coma are the best in the book.
Most readers find the genre blend never fully coheres, and count James Moxie and Smoke among his better characters.
Daphne (2022)
A slasher novel about a high school basketball team and a local urban legend that arrives when you think about her.
The mechanism, that anxiety itself summons the killer, is genuinely inventive and it’s the most modern-feeling thing he’s written.
Incidents Around the House (2024)
Narrated by Bela, who is eight, and the entire novel is in her voice.
She has a friend called Other Mommy who lives in the closet and in the walls and has been asking her the same question for a long time, which is whether Bela will let her into her heart. Bela keeps saying no. Other Mommy keeps asking.
Then Other Mommy starts appearing when the parents are in the room.
The child narrator is the whole achievement and Malerman sustains it completely. Bela does not have the vocabulary for what is happening, so she describes it literally, and the reader assembles the situation from a child’s account of things she finds normal.
Her parents’ marriage is failing in the background and she reports that in the same register.
It is his most frightening book and the one that finally delivered on the promise of Bird Box, and several critics named it the horror novel of its year.
Where to Start
Read Bird Box, and read it in as few sittings as you can, because it works on sustained tension rather than on incident.
If you want the atmospheric one, read Goblin. If you want the recent one, read Incidents Around the House.
A House at the Bottom of a Lake is the one everybody else will tell you to read next. I’d skip it unless a quiet romance in a strange setting is what you’re after, because it is not a horror novel and it is slower than its length should allow.
And go into the rest of the Josh Malerman books knowing that the premises are reliably excellent and the execution is not, which is a fair trade at his best and frustrating at his worst.
A note on support: this page mentions suicide. If you’re struggling, you don’t have to handle it alone. In the US you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Elsewhere, the International Association for Suicide Prevention keeps a directory of crisis centers at iasp.info.
For the wider canon, see my horror classics page. The stranger end of what he does belongs with my sci-fi horror list.
