New Arrival: Review of Paul Tremblay's The Cabin at the End of the World

Apocalyptic fiction is a well-known subgenre that includes but is in no way limited to zombie tales like World War Z. From Stephen King’s The Stand to Josh Malerman’s Bird Box, writers have speculated not only on the many ways the world can end but what humans will do once civilization has wound down. Paul Tremblay, the author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, has created a completely unique take on the apocalypse by adding a healthy dash of home-invasion-narrative in The Cabin at the End of the World.

The story begins with a precocious little girl named Wen catching grasshoppers outside the cabin where she and her two dads are vacationing. She then sees a very large man come up their driveway. After Wen and the man (Leonard) talk awhile, the man’s friends walk up the driveway with their crudely-improvised weapons.  

This conversation and the arrival of Leonard’s friend begin Tremblay’s torture session of a novel. Not tortuous to read, mind you, but reading to see if Wen and her fathers (Eric and Adam) survive and hoping that the three somehow make it through all this okay, even when the reader knows better. The possibility of a happy ending is particularly distant when Leonard gives the family an impossible dilemma that puts the fate of the world at stake. To reveal more about the plot is to risk spoiling moments that add to the story. This story is a bullet train that is barreling toward the end of a track, and each of these little events that come before the climax is just an uptick in speed.

The reader also can’t simply get off this train because we don’t want to. Tremblay portrays both family and captors as people the reader can empathize with, forcing said readers to invest themselves in the outcome. Even as the story gains momentum, Tremblay shows command of descriptors that build this family into three-dimensional people we need to see escape, but Tremblay is an adept torturer. He has demonstrated time and again how to turn the screws on his characters, and subsequently the reader. Just when you think that they get some respite, or think that things possibly couldn’t get any worse, they immediately become worse and the screws are tightened a little bit more. This book is the go-to example for psychological horror. Like a lot of great horror, the supernatural aspects are secondary. Tremblay, as a writer, is simply content to sit back after he builds the set and let his characters torture each other.