QUAKING IN OUR BOOKS
The ongoing renaissance in horror fiction moves forward as promising young writers with unique perspectives continue to appear. Two notable relative newcomers, Josh Malerman and Paul Tremblay, have published novels that are personal, unsettling and peculiarly suited to our current historical moment.
Malerman came to prominence with 2014’s Bird Box, which imagined a world overrun by “creatures” that inspire homicidal violence in anyone who sees them. The narrative alternated between a psychologically acute portrait of life under total lockdown and a harrowing account of a blindfolded journey downriver toward a possible sanctuary.
Malorie is a direct sequel to Bird Box. The title character is the woman who, accompanied by her two small children, undertook that blindfolded voyage. As the new narrative begins, the sanctuary has been breached, and she and the children must once again navigate an unsafe world. When an itinerant “postman” brings news of a surviving community that might include her parents, Malorie sets out on another impossible journey.
Malerman focuses on the limitations and psychological pressures of lives distorted by the constant threat of a violent end. Malorie, along with her children, has been forced into a narrow life deprived of the most fundamental pleasures. Malerman balances the novel’s elements — family drama, road novel, supernatural thriller — with skill and genuine compassion for his characters and their blighted lives.
Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song tells of a viral epidemic that sweeps across Massachusetts. The virus is a hyper-virulent strain of rabies with no reliable vaccine. This strain reaches its full lethal potential in little more than an hour and has a fatality rate of 100 per cent.
Natalie, a pregnant housewife, is days away from giving birth when an infected stranger breaks into her home and kills her husband, biting Natalie and infecting her in turn. Ramola is a pediatric doctor and Natalie’s oldest friend. The bulk of the narrative concerns Ramola’s attempts to drive her friend through a world filled with obstacles toward a place of safety — and potential assistance — that may not exist.
Although the novel’s seeming prescience is largely accidental, it reflects a distinct — and distinctly political — point of view. Tremblay’s world is one in which help and medical resources are “stretched to the breaking point,” exacerbated by “a myopic, sluggish bureaucracy” and a president “woefully unprepared to make the rational, science-based decisions necessary.” So, art and life continue to mirror one another.