I had intended to read Bird Box during RIP but didn’t get around to it in time. I thought I might save it for next year, but then a spooky mood came over me and I started reading it right before a camping trip. Perfect, I thought, a creepy read in a creepily lit tent!
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out quite the way I intended. The beginning parts were indeed sufficiently creepy, and I ended up reading most of the book before I even left for my camping trip. The story, if you’ve missed out on it, is that in the near future a Terrible Thing happens and people start killing themselves or going on murderous rampages and then killing themselves, all because of a Something that apparently lives outside. If you see it, it makes you go insane, so nobody knows what it is to go kill it or whatever. So, that’s terrifying.
Also terrifying is the main character’s decision to take herself and two small children into the outside, for reasons that are explained later, down a river on a boat with the Something potentially RIGHT NEXT TO THEM OMG.
More terrifying are the backstory scenes that lead up to this big decision, wherein you find out why this woman is living with these two kids, alone, in a house covered in blood. Spoiler: people are just as creepy as unknown Somethings, sometimes.
So, sufficiently creeped out, I snuggled into my tent to read the last parts of this book by lantern-light, only to have my lantern, with its four heavy D batteries, fall right on my face. After ascertaining that I hadn’t chipped a tooth or bled all over the place, I decided that the camping gods really just wanted me to go to sleep, so I did. Then I got up with the sunrise and decided to read while I waited for my husband to wake up.
And so, not unlike The Family Plot before it, I found myself reading the end of a spooky book in the calmest, quietest, most tranquil setting possible. Which is a terrible way to read a horror book, let me tell you.
It also didn’t help that the story changes a bit toward the end; where at the beginning it’s all questions and creepiness and Bad Things and whatnot, the end is full of answers (well, not the big answer) and resolution and possibly no more Bad Things, which, boring. I literally do not want to know whether or not these people survive. And I guess I don’t, but I have a pretty good idea.
But, on the other hand the writing is really good and the horror is largely psychological and I certainly did want to avoid going outside while reading this. I’m still not a fan of the ending, but that’s not really unusual for me. I would definitely recommend this if read only with spooky mood lighting at midnight in an empty house et cetera.
