'Bird Box' redux: Read an exclusive excerpt from Josh Malerman's horror sequel 'Malorie'

"Bird Box" author Josh Malerman can create a terrifying reality, but all he's got is love when it comes to Sandra Bullock.

"She’s one of the all-time Hollywood greats: classy, brilliant, leaps off the screen, but with poise,” says Malerman, whose 2014 post-apocalyptic horror novel was adapted as an Internet-breaking 2018 Netflix film starring Bullock. "When I met her, I discovered she’s the kind of person who emanates presence and warmth, the kind of person you want to be yourself around because you get the idea she’s doing the same.”

She’s also partly the inspiration for "Malorie” (out July 21, Del Ray). USA TODAY has an exclusive excerpt from Malerman’s "Bird Box" sequel, which picks up with the main characters 12 years later and again navigates a world populated with monsters who cause madness and suicidal tendencies if you look at them.

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“Bird Box” followed Malorie (played by Bullock in the movie) and her two children as they took a river trip, blindfolded, to find sanctuary at a school for the blind. The sequel was inspired by a plot thread Malerman removed from a rough draft of the first book, Bullock being “electrifying” and also the fact that the Netflix adaptation “gloriously exploded,” the author says. A Christmastime streaming drop caught fire on social media, spawned the (somewhat unfortunate) Bird Box Challenge and caught the attention of everyone from Chrissy Teigen to horror master Stephen King.

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“It felt like I was standing at the head of a wind tunnel, all manner of thrill coming through that tunnel, and I was watching the details of a long-held fantasy filled in, as if some unseen benefactor was making real something I’d only imagine in my office before,” Malerman says of the reaction.

With “Malorie,” which is already in development as a sequel film at Netflix, the time jump gives Malorie “something close to peers” in kids Tom and Olympia, both now 16 and thinking for themselves. “Sometimes this is good. Sometimes it’s not,” Malerman says. “Tom is obsessed with progress in a world where such things are dangerous – and necessary – and while Olympia seems to be the ideal child, she has secrets of her own.

“I felt like we’d already seen Malorie justifiably lording over the pair in ‘Bird Box.’ How would she react to them as peers? How strong are her old-world rules to two teens who have only known this new one? And how much longer can she solely rely on the blindfold when her kids have enormous ideas of their own?”

The followup starts with a knock at the door from a man who claims to be with the census, boasts of success and failure regarding the creatures, and even has a list of survivors. Malorie doesn’t trust him, but the information he has and hope that comes with it are enough to set them out on another epic journey.

Malorie, Tom and Olympia also have an abandoned summer camp to themselves at the beginning of “Malorie,” “but it’s still a harrowing experience, walking from one cabin to another. Going to the lodge is an event,” says Malerman. He can relate a little better to this now after being in quarantine. “Going to the mailbox these days feels like stepping into the unknown. And while I’m a complete and committed optimist, I’m not convinced I have the mettle to endure 17 years of the ‘new world’ like Malorie has. If there’s one link between the world of Malorie and the one we’re all navigating now, it’s the not knowing when this will pass, even more than the masks.”

The following excerpt takes place a third of the way into the sequel. “As Malorie and Olympia sleep, Tom does something ill-advised, a step or two past dangerous,” Malerman explains. “He does so while wearing a hood and gloves because, by way of a blind woman going mad, Malorie believes the creatures have evolved, that they can get to you in more ways than one now: by sight, of course, but also by touch.

"But can they? Tom wants to know.”

Read below for an exclusive excerpt from "Malorie":

Tom waits for Malorie to fall asleep. Even in the dark, it’s not hard for him to determine. Malorie and Olympia don’t always snore, but both breathe differently when they go under. Tom believes he can hear it when they dream. Often, back in Camp Yadin, this idea comforted him and eased him into his own deep slumber.

They’re in a barn. Olympia found it a mile and a half after Malorie asked that they abandon the road and walk in tandem until they found a place for the night. Tom, who has been lying on a floor of harsh, wilted hay, gets up. 

He takes crouched steps, one at a time, his arms extended, his fingers searching in the darkness for Malorie’s bag. He knows where it is. He’s kept his ear on the spot, the exact spot, since she set it there twenty-five minutes ago.

A flutter from the loft, and Tom cocks his ear toward it. He already knows it’s only a bird. But will it flap its wings? Will it wake Malorie?

He finds the straps that have kept the bag tight to Malorie’s back for the duration of their walk. He lifts it from the hay with care.

He pauses. He listens. He hears nobody outside the barn.

The door does not creak when he opens it. He slips outside, already removing the flashlight from his pocket, already pulling out the rolled blanket.

Eyes closed, he moves swiftly to the side of the barn, covers himself and the bag with the blanket, secures it to the ground with his knees and elbows, and turns on the light.

He opens his eyes.

It strikes him that, even if something had gotten under the blanket with him, he wouldn’t care. He believes he’d have heard it before seeing it, would’ve had time to close his eyes.

He’s so sick of being afraid of the creatures.

The white tips of the pages appeal to him like so many invitations, asking him to read, read on, read on till morning.

He knows exactly where he wants to begin. He removes the stack from the bag and flips through until he reaches the page headed: INDIAN RIVER.

It’s a city in northern Michigan. And the description of it is everywhere Tom wants to be.

He reads:

Indian River, Michigan, has become one of the most progressive communities I’ve yet to encounter. Their citizenry numbers three hundred. Most sleep in tents and what was once a plain, two-story brick office building, But none spend their days indoors.

Tom’s heart picks up speed. Already he can tell these are his kind of people. The kind that push back against the creatures.

A town of many inventions, Indian River is not for the faint of heart. One man claims to have caught a creature, but this was not corroborated by anyone else I spoke to. NOTE: Almost everyone I asked told me they hoped he had.

“Yes!” Tom half cries out, half whispers. He can’t help it. A whole town of people who want to hear a creature was caught?

And maybe, just maybe, one was.

The de facto leader of the town is a woman named Athena Hantz. It was difficult for me to gauge her age as she has the passion of the young and the fortitude of someone much older. Miss Hantz claims she has “wholly accepted the creatures.” She insists they no longer drive people mad and have no intention of doing so. She believes, fiercely, they have changed over time. Her words: “They don’t punish us anymore.”

Tom’s eyes widen. This is heavy stuff. The idea that the creatures have changed . . .

He thinks of the man from the bait shop. He didn’t die when he left. This after saying he was close to looking.

Did he look?

Tom reads:

Without being able to verify if she lives the way she claims, I only have our brief encounter to judge her by. And by my own estimation, Athena Hantz is sane.

Tom nods along with the words. He’s impressed the census man felt compelled to include this. He wants to wake his mom, to show her, to say, see, see? Not everybody who thinks differently than Malorie is mad!

Athena Hantz.

Without any idea what she looks or sounds like, Tom imagines Athena Hantz is his mother instead. What would it mean for him to have been raised by a person like this in a place like that?

Indian River already feels more like home than Camp Yadin ever did.

Indian River is north of Lansing. Tom checked Malorie’s map twice before they left Yadin. It’s on the way to Mackinaw City.

Could he . . . might he . . . will he get to experience this city, these people, in person?

He wants to cry out. He wants to throw the blanket aside and run, loud, through the fields that no doubt lie beyond the barn. He wants to feel the night upon him. The open air. The freedom of the people who live in Indian River.

And he wants to see it. The world. The stars, the sky, the moon, the darkness.

He wants to see the night. This night. Every night. The night he learned about Indian River and the people who live there. The night he discovered others do think like he does. What’s the word Olympia uses for this kind of thing?

Relate.

Yes. Tom relates. It’s enough to make him want to climb to the top of the barn and scream hallelujah. The world isn’t made up of people who only think like Malorie. The world isn’t made up of people who only live by the fold. Not everybody will remind you, over and over, to wear your blindfold and your hoodie and your gloves when you’re the one who ought to be reminding them since you were the one born into this world in the first place.

“YES!”

He’s said it too loud. He doesn’t care. Let Mom come blindly flailing, feeling for the outer walls of the barn. Let her come shuddering into the night, this night, his night. There are people out there who think the way he does! There are people who understand that sixteen years could easily become thirty-two, then sixty-four, and . . . and . . . and an entire lifetime gone, sucked up into the paranoid rules of the Goddamn creatures.

He wishes Athena Hantz was his mom.

He flips the pages, wants to keep reading, doesn’t need to sleep. He’s sixteen years old, he’s hungry for a new life, he’s wide awake under a night’s sky that’s no different than day’s to him. He brings the pages closer to his nose.

He hears footsteps coming around the side of the barn.

He turns off the light.

Huddled beneath the blanket, his first instinct is to keep the papers close to his chest. He realizes, with sudden clarity, that it’s more important to him to hold onto these pages than it is to warn Malorie and Olympia that something is near.

He closes his eyes.

He listens.

Whatever it is, it’s close. It moves slow. He doesn’t think it’s an animal, but it’s hard to tell in all this open space. Inside a house there’s an echo, dimensions, a blueprint.

Outside it’s different.

Whatever it is, it steps closer. Tom doesn’t want to feel afraid, but that’s what he is. He wants the fear within him to pour out, to leave him, to flow back toward the road, back to Camp Yadin, back to the school for the blind, back to the house he was born in.

Another step in the grass. It’s a creature. He knows this now.

The sky is silent; his mom and sister breathe steady on the other side of the wood wall. He slowly removes the blanket from his head. The cool night air chills him, and he doesn’t want to tremble in the presence of a creature.

We’re allowed, he thinks.

Yet he shudders.

He stands. He rolls up the sleeves of his hoodie.

“Touch me,” he says. “I dare you.”