Terrible Choices: Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World

The Cabin at the End of the World (2018)

Written by: Paul Tremblay
Genre: Horror
Pages: 288 (Hardcover)
Publisher: William Morrow

Why I Chose It: The cover caught my eye at work—that and the title. I wondered: Is this “end of the world” business literal? After reading the summary I realized it might be, and given that I have a weird kind of fascination with that sort of thing, I decided to go for it.

The Premise:

Seven-year-old Wen and her parents, Eric and Andrew, are vacationing at a remote cabin on a quiet New Hampshire lake. Their closest neighbors are more than two miles in either direction along a rutted dirt road.

One afternoon, as Wen catches grasshoppers in the front yard, a stranger unexpectedly appears in the driveway. Leonard is the largest man Wen has ever seen but he is young, friendly, and he wins her over almost instantly. Leonard and Wen talk and play until Leonard abruptly apologizes and tells Wen, “None of what’s going to happen is your fault”. Three more strangers then arrive at the cabin carrying unidentifiable, menacing objects. As Wen sprints inside to warn her parents, Leonard calls out: “Your dads won’t want to let us in, Wen. But they have to. We need your help to save the world.”

Thus begins an unbearably tense, gripping tale of paranoia, sacrifice, apocalypse, and survival that escalates to a shattering conclusion, one in which the fate of a loving family and quite possibly all of humanity are entwined.

Review Contains Spoilers

Discussion: I don’t normally read books that are shelved in the Fiction section of the store. I often find that I’m disappointed in them for a variety of reasons. The plot takes forever to get anywhere. I don’t connect with the characters very well. It’s rare that I find something in it that I enjoy—and most of the time anything I do enjoy actually comes out of the YA fiction section.

But this book sounded interesting and even if it did turn out to just be a basic home-invasion-with-crazies sort of book, it’s October and that means I’m more open to horror.

I grew worried early on when I found myself (yet again) having trouble connecting emotionally with the characters. I think a part of it was how they were presented as well as the point of view being used. Everything is essentially told to the reader by a primarily omniscient third person present point of view. It’s hard enough to pull off present tense as it is, but this combination makes it even more awkward. As a reader I felt more detached from the people on the pages, including the little girl, Wen. And rather than bring me into the character, I’m simply told things. Long paragraphs featuring past events that I suppose are meant to make me care, but they fall flat like they’re just facts and statements being repeated so I know something about these people. It’s frustrating. A good example happens early on with Eric. Slapped on the page is basic information about Eric’s past; how he came out as gay to his parents, how they refused to pay his college tuition because of it, and so he had to work in a sandwich shop to pay for the rest of his school. There is no emotion here. Nothing that feels like it matters. Readers don’t know how Eric truly felt about this extremely important moment in his life — for all we know he was indifferent about it, which I seriously doubt would be the case for most people in such a situation, but we’ll never know. Granted, I’ll never know what that’s like, but books are supposed to make me at least empathize in some small way; to make me care about the character I’m going on a journey with. Instead we get things like his parents showed up at his apartment crying, gave him a check to pay for the tuition, and then he moved to Boston. Um…okay?

The other problem with this near-info dumping is that it can appear at some of the most frustrating of times and then ultimately serves no true purpose. It doesn’t do anything to endear the characters to me the way it’s probably supposed to. The first one happened so early on and at such an inopportune moment that I even remember what page it was—35. Wen runs in to tell her dads about the strange people coming to the cabin and, for reasons unknown, readers are treated to an unnecessarily long description of the cabin’s interior. “To the left of the love seat,” and “On the wall to their right directly across from the front door,” are some of the phrases used to describe exact locations of things that truly do not matter. Tell me the basics; my brain can fill in the rest. While I know the rules of writing aren’t really rules and more like guidelines, page 35 (and half of 36) are a direct example of what I’ve always been told not to do and it’s easy to see why. It’s boring, it doesn’t add anything, and this all happened right in the middle of action. I started ranting a little bit at work to coworkers, saying things like, “There are people trying to get in the house – why am I being told what the cabin looks like?” It slows everything down and serves no purpose.

When the action actually hits and isn’t interrupted, it’s fantastic. Shit hits the fan—hard­—and goes everywhere (metaphorically speaking, of course). As you read you can’t decide what is going on. Are these people for real? Are they foretelling the end of the world? Or are they just plain nuts? As pieces fall into place, you start to doubt along with some of the other characters but you still can’t be 100% certain. There are unexpected twists and people die that you didn’t fully expect to die. Descriptions of actions taken during these moments are good; they feel more visceral and a little less like we’re being told what’s happening from a distance. And for the entire book you wonder—how the hell is this going to end? If anything, I was gripped because I wanted to know. Even if I only cared for the characters a minuscule amount, I still wanted to know if the end of the world truly was happening because it seriously started to look like it was, and that made my next question equally important: was it going to be stopped? Likewise, what force was behind this? God? Something older? More sinister? More cruel and wanting to see what a small sliver of humanity was willing to do in order to save the rest of the world?

And therein lies the biggest issue I have with this book. The end. It’s one of those moments where you stutter to yourself and wonder if you’ve actually reached the end or if there’s somehow more beyond the page you just read even if the very next page is the Acknowledgements. Because it’s not an end; it’s not a conclusion in any real sense of the word. I looked up reviews to see if I was the only one with this issue, to see if maybe I missed something somehow. But I hadn’t and I recall one reviewer mentioning how the book had a beginning, a middle, and then just stopped and I’m inclined to agree with that assessment. I’ll take an end where everyone lives, but I’ll also take one that’s a shitty situation for the characters—this is horror, after all. Yet readers are treated to a non-ending that felt more like the author couldn’t decide if he wanted it to be God or something else or nothing at all. You’re left hanging. Wondering.

It also felt like Eric and Andrew should have been the main characters all along, rather than introducing readers to Wen first. I felt attached to her the most, even if sections of the book did move to Eric, Andrew, and a few of the others. But because she’s the one pointed out to on the book’s blurb and the one I’m introduced to first, she’s the one I’m interested in most. I suppose it’s the author’s way of pulling a surprise twist on readers, but instead it just left me kind of lost and unsure of who I was supposed to be connecting to—especially since I’d never fully connected with either of Wen’s dads. Even stranger, there are moments near the end where the point of view switches to a sort of first person; the use of “we” appears in some paragraphs and I have no idea why or if it’s supposed to be significant. If it is, it falls flat and just left me wondering why it was there.

In Conclusion: This book had so much potential and held me interested at so many points, yet in the end I was left highly disappointed. There were so many areas that should have (and could have) worked better. I did really like all the possibilities this book explored, even if they never fully came to fruition. If you’re into apocalyptic stories and what people are willing to do in extreme situations, this book might work for you, but be ready for a non-ending unless ambiguity is your bag. If that’s the case, then have fun.