July 5, 2021
Bestseller Malerman (Bird Box) offers a muddy, meandering horror tale that nevertheless contains some memorably upsetting images. The residents of small town Chowder, Mich., grapple with the presence of Pearl, a telepathic pig with the ability to control the minds of humans and drive them mad with hallucinations. Among those affected are a farmer’s daughter who fights to protect her family from the pig that terrified her in her youth, a trio of stoned teenagers who explore Pearl’s farm only to uncover mind-melting horrors, and a broken businessman who must finally confront the malevolent force that has haunted him for a decade. As the bodies pile up, the townspeople’s paths converge at Pearl’s barn, where they must maintain enough sanity to defeat Pearl once and for all. The novel suffers from thin characterization and a lack of narrative momentum, and though Malerman’s exclamatory style lends itself well to the scarier moments, the story never quite manages to work its way around to coherence. This is best suited for Malerman’s die-hard fans. Agent: Kristen Nelson, Nelson Literary.
January 1, 2022
Malerman (Bird Box) fortifies a well-established body of work with his latest, a novel about a psychic pig's murderous rampage. Pearl, a deformed pig on a farm near Chowder, MI, seems to be a mere curiosity until he manipulates his owner's teenage grandson Jeff to maul another, healthy pig. When Jeff blames Pearl, Pearl begins his unholy war against humanity. Surreal internal conflicts fit the small-town setting perfectly, even if the characters sometimes stall into fugue-like thoughts. Pearl finds the latent guilt in everyone--from a meatpacking tycoon, to a dedicated police officer, to a high school student dreaming of the outside world--and twists it to his own purposes. Despite this, Pearl only exacerbates existing problems in order to inflict his own punishment. Malerman's work is an intimate horror in a highly localized scope, as well as an examination of the way a community accounts for the mistakes it perpetuates. Narrator Sarah Mollo-Christensen's even tone captures the highly personal nature of the drama, but sometimes the prose wants to move faster than her voice does. VERDICT Buy it. Possibly Malerman's best.--Aaron Heil
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