Josh Malerman
Josh Malerman is an author.
There was a working life before the publishing one. Malerman plays rhythm guitar in the rock band The High Strung, writes songs, draws cartoons, and has since moved into directing and producing film as well. Bird Box arrived in 2014 and did what debut horror novels almost never manage, which is to escape the genre shelf entirely, helped considerably by the Netflix adaptation it inspired. He holds a Bram Stoker Award for short fiction, and in 2020 he set up a production company, Spin a Black Yarn, with his manager Ryan Lewis.
What he is genuinely good at is constraint. Bird Box takes sight away and then refuses to hand the reader any compensating information, so the prose has to run on sound, touch and counting. A House at the Bottom of a Lake removes almost all incident and runs instead on the specific dread of a thing that should not be where it is. The books are usually built around one withheld fact, and the discipline is in not blinking first.
The output since has been fast and uneven, which is the honest description rather than a complaint. Malorie continues the story of the first book. Unbury Carol, Black Mad Wheel, Goblin, Inspection, Daphne and Pearl arrive at a pace not every one of them justifies, and Incidents Around the House in 2024 is the strongest of the recent run. Note that the credits here include a good many translations and alternate editions of the same handful of novels, so the shelf looks longer than the bibliography.
Books (35)
- Bird Box (2014)
- Bird Box (Bird Box #1) (2014)
- Incidents Around the House (2024)
- Malorie (2019)
- Goblin (2021)
- Teftiş (2019)
- Bird Box: A Novel (2014)
- Spin a Black Yarn (2023)
- Christmas and Other Horrors (2023)
- Daphne (2022)
- Pearl (2021)
- Beneath a Pale Sky (2021)
- When Things Get Dark (2021)
- Inspection (2019)
- In Darkness, Delight (2019)
- Malorie – Sequencia de Caixa de Passaros (2019)
- In Darkness, Delight: Masters of Midnight (2019)
- Carol Gömülmeden (2019)
- Bird Box MTI (2019)
- Primogen (2018)
- Doorbells at Dusk (2018)
- Unbury Carol (Thorndike Press Large Print Bill's Bookshelf) (2018)
- Dark Moon Digest Issue #32/#33 (2018)
- Unbury Carol (2018)
- Kırmızı Piyano (2017)
- Little Deaths (2017)
- Black mad wheel (2017)
- Piano vermelho (2017)
- A House at the Bottom of a Lake (2016)
- I Can Taste the Blood (2016)
Where to start with Josh Malerman
Everyone starts with Bird Box, and for once the obvious choice is the right one. It works because of what it withholds: the characters cannot look, so neither can you, and an entire suspense engine gets built out of a rule the reader is forced to obey. Read it before you watch the film.
Malorie picks the story up afterwards and is the more conventional book, better if you want the world explained than if you want it dreaded. Second on the list should be A House at the Bottom of a Lake, short, strange and almost incident-free, the purest sample of his instincts anywhere. From there Unbury Carol and Black mad wheel are the swings away from the horror shelf, Goblin is the most structurally unusual thing he has done, and Incidents Around the House is the most frightening of the recent books. Several titles listed for him are alternate editions of the same novel, so check before you buy twice.
Josh Malerman on CrossBinge
- the cover story: How Much Should Other Mommy Give Away?