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Malerman, Josh

Entry updated 13 January 2025. Tagged: Author.

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(1975-    ) US rock musician and author, co-founder in 2000 and lead singer and guitarist of the band The High Strung. His Malorie sequence, beginning with Bird Box (2014), is set in a Near Future world devastated by an Alien Invasion: anyone who catches sight of an invader goes murderously and/or suicidally insane (see Disaster; Horror in SF). The protagonist Malorie Walsh blindfolds herself and her children, and they escape to a school for the blind. In the sequel Malorie (2020), which begins after two years of blindfold existence, Malorie must save her family from an intensification of the artifactual Pandemic, as the aliens can now drive humans insane by touching them. The family find refuge in a deserted summer camp (see Keep), but after a decade begin, as it were, to see the light of a liveable outcome out in the world. The first volume of the sequence was filmed as Bird Box (2018) directed by Susanne Bier.

A House at the Bottom of a Lake (2016) is a supernatural fiction. This novel was filmed as Bird Box (2018) directed by Susanne Bier. Black Mad Wheel (2017) repeats some of the structuring of Malerman's first novel, with a rock musician protagonist suffering something like Amnesia which may prevent him from comprehending the nature of a killing sound, a Basilisk his band has been sent into an African desert to trace. The beginnings of something like World War Three may lurk there, discernible through Clichés and aperçus offered by Horror in SF. Unbury Carol (2018) contains some hints of Gothic SF, but the Reincarnations of its Sleeping-Beauty-like protagonist seem supernatural in the end. Inspection (2019) carries over some of his proficient horror toolkit to a Near Future tale set in a world – seemingly America – riven into dread solitudinousness, a condition articulated through the separation of male from female in the tale. Not really Young Adult in tone, the narrative focuses on the coming of age of a young man and young woman, each of them raised separately in isolated schools in deep woods [for Into the Woods see the Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. [JC]

Josh Malerman

born Southfield, Michigan: 24 July 1975

works

series

Malorie

  • Bird Box (New York: HarperCollins/Ecco, 2014) [Malorie: pb/Suet Yee Chong and Shutterstock, Inc]
    • Bird Box (Concord, California: Dark Regions Press, 2019) [exp of the above as coll: one story added: Malorie: illus/Glenn Chadbourne: hb/Vincent Chong]
  • Malorie (New York: Del Rey, 2020) [Malorie: hb/]

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