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.

Screen to Scream: Hell House, LLC and A Head Full of Ghosts

This is an experiment I wanted to try. Readers’ advisory is typically through connections between books or authors, the algebraic equation for this something like, “if you like x, you should try y.” But readers’ advisory can also be done with horror movies, not just by matching them with subject matter (ghosts, vampires, etc.) but also with themes. These comparisons won’t be movies made from books and vice versa (no comparisons between the book The Shining and the movie), but comparing a book and a movie that talk about similar ideas and even make similar conclusions. I wanted to try this experiment, analyzing the connective tissue between films and novels, with two stories demonstrate how horror works while also showing that it’s still possible to feel terror when you can see inside the machine’s inner workings. 

Hell House, LLC is shot like an actual documentary about an incident at a haunted house attraction at the Abbadon Hotel. The movie gets some interviews and backstory about the incident, clueing in the audience, but the documentary crew lucks out by finding survivor Sara Havel, who not only appears to tell her side of the story but brings footage the crew of Hell House shot before the incident occurred. This story has two parallel narratives, but one narrative works backwards, providing the dark history of the hotel and the cover-up of the incident, while another focuses on the Hell House crew getting the place ready, encountering spooky goings on that gets progressively worse as they get closer to opening night (the film even counts down the days left until the dreaded opening night). The audience sees all the pieces come together at the opening night climax when Hell literally breaks loose. Unlike found footage movies that can’t get beyond the simple novelty of the genre, the directors of Hell House use the first-person viewpoint to generate some genuine scares that feel like the audience is in the haunted house that will inevitably cause so much destruction of life.

There is no visuals, no pictures, in Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, but the story is a great mediation on how one camera lens can be a limited viewpoint to process tragedy, particularly when so many other things are going on behind the scenes. The lens in question belongs to the show “The Possession,” which focuses on 14-year-old Marjorie Bennett, a girl prescribed an exorcism to deal with her demons and her family pushed to their breaking point. The book reveals, through the blog entries of The Last Final Girl, what the home audience saw of the Bennet family’s nightmare, but younger sister Merrie offers her own personal view, influenced by being eight-years-old and forced to watch her beloved sister’s mental and physical decline as well as the ultimate tragedy that spares no one, living or dead. Like Hell House, readers are given brief sips of foreshadowing before consuming the main course of this family’s pain, culminating in a climax that, while more subdued (less people screaming, less explosions), it still manages to be just as, perhaps even more, horrifying.

From the use of Seward’s phonograph in Dracula to today’s found footage films, horror has been on the cusp of using different media to offer multiple viewpoints, generate frights, and even confuse the viewer as to what’s actually happening. Some key phrases that might interest patrons include “slowly building tension” and “insane climax” (jaws may indeed hit the floor) but there’s also the fourth-wall breaking that both movie and book do, showing how the scream machine works but letting readers and viewers know that those who operate said machine are powerless to stop it once its running at top speed.