rating bumped to 5 stars.
I read this book last year but somehow i just can't seem to get it out of my head. it is so beautifully disturbing.

OMG! What the hell was this? I am still turning pages, still hoping to find answers. Seriously, this book was disturbing. I had thought the ending would provide some solace to my disturbed mind, but it just made me even more confused and terrified. But it doesn't reduce my love for this book, it had me engrossed from the very first page and I just couldn't put it down.

The book has two timeline: past and present.

In past we meet this young girl Malorie, recently divorced and pregnant in a world that is going crazy. Her sister, who Malorie is living with, is the one, who have an epiphany that something stranger then they could ever imagine is going out there. People all over the world are losing their shit. They just seems to be going crazy and committing horrific murders of people around them and killing themselves. Self-immolation and HaraKiri are the words people reffering this incidents with. It's believed that all of this weirdness started in Russia and trickle down its way into United states. At first everyone thinks that these incidents are unrelated but later they start to see the connection. Alot of theories starts to come up, the most common one being that something or someone is out their that people see before losing their mind. The fear of the unknown aggravates so much that people starts walking around with blinds folds on, keeping their doors closed and windows covered so they can't see outside.

Malorie, to safe her unborn child, heads for the safe house that she learned about from a newspaper. At the safe house she meets 4 people with limited food and supplies trying to survive in the new world. She expected that these people will have the answers but they had nothing they could tell her.

"They are like infinity, it seems. Something too complex for us to comprehend."

"Our minds have ceilings, Malorie, these things... they are beyond it."

The present is set four years later. Malorie is still in the safe house, preparing to embark on journey with two kids by her side. The rest of the people aren't there, she is alone. She is desparate to reach somewhere, like this is her only hope. She has been training her kids for years for this very journey.

"your children are smarter than you."

Will she survive? Will she ever get the answer she's been looking for?


For me this book was like giant metaphor. We all are wearing a blindfold, we refuse to look outside and face the reality. We believe what media and people wants us to believe because going against a popular opinion will get us labelled as a rebellion; it will make people to hate us. Not doing what we truely believe in, is what makes us go crazy.

We fear the unknown, we dislike uncertainties and hence we fear going against the norms that we know shouldn't have been there in the first place. We fear others; we fear people like us and they fear us.

"Man is the creature he fears."