They are monsters, Malorie thinks. But she knows they are more than this. They are infinity.

I never actually sought out an agent or a publishing house. A friend of mine named David Simmer got wind of what I was doing, and he sent one of my books to a literary lawyer in Los Angeles. He loved it, and he sent it to other people, including an agent, and he picked me up, and that's how 'Bird Box' got to where it is now.

So what did influence 'Bird Box?' Well, I've had a crush on Medusa since about 1985. Maybe the book is an ode to her.

Boots, bushes, gardens, storefronts, buildings, streets, and stars. Why, she would have had to re-create the globe for them. But the best they got was fish. And the Boy loved them.

I didn't get a formal introduction to horror until right about the age of 12, when my uncle showed me 'Twilight Zone: The Movie.' When you're 12 years old, and you see that - oh, God. I devoured as many horror movies and novels as possible.

After college, I went on a real big classics kick. Read everything by Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Proust, Dostoevsky. And that classics train dropped me off at 'Dracula.' Halfway through it, I understood I'd never be going back, never 'leaving' the genre again. Since then, I've been on a fairly strict horror diet.