Not horrible, but unrewarding and unnecessary. Maybe I shouldn’t have read this and Bird Box back-to-back, but just as the author seems like he got bored with writing the story near the end, that’s how I felt reading it.

Malerman picks up this fantastic story and sprints with it. Unfortunately the third act suffers as his sprinting becomes frantic and his failure to flesh out key plot points left me wondering how he decides to carefully craft these story lines only to tie them up with a paragraph or two (the fate of ‘Henry’, the story of ‘Sam’ are notable examples). I can’t help but think the next Netflix script deadline had something to do with the expedited conclusion to this honestly fabulous tale. RE: the addendum- I have read most of Malermans books, usually in a day easily. I think it’s great that Malerman considers himself a Prolific but I don’t really see why his somewhat self aggrandizing diatribe needs to fill space in this book. Maybe should have saved it for the Vanity Fair spread (photos by Leibovitz natch)

I really enjoyed reading Birdbox, so my expectations for this book were high. Sadly, it seems as though the author was getting bored with the world he created, so when the story was only half done he raced to tie everything up in a quick little bow and call it “finished”...

Clearly the author was on a publisher deadline. The books starts fresh with the obvious and expected— the world is falling apart again. And the middle begins to develop something tangible. But the last 30 pages read like the author had to cram in last minute Saturday morning after being guilty of enjoying a wild Friday binge. It ends badly and speaks volumes that this author is a fraud