The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay
My rating: 4/5 cats
what. the. fuck. was. that?
here’s the thing, ever since paul tremblay wrote A Head Full of Ghosts and slipped in a character named “karen brissette” whose voice sounded an awful lot like the inside of my own (ghostless) head, i’ve been pestering him with, “am i gonna be in the next book, huh?? huh?? huh?? am i??”
but i am so glad to not be in this one because YEESH.
i don’t even know how to review it.
it’s pretty telling that the synopsis on here and the back-cover copy of the ARC is basically, “here are many specific details about what happens in the very very beginning, including pull quotes, which is never done, followed by a vague mini-paragraph about the rest of the book. enjoy!”
because going any further into trying to describe the plot will a) make the reviewer sound insane and b) ruin the thrill of discovery for the reader.
i think the whole point of this book is to make the reader squirm. not with excess gore or violence or anything like that. but with anticipation.
it’s a held-breath kind of book, where you need to know how it’s going to resolve more than anything, but you must resist flipping ahead, cheater! it’s page after page of stubborn standoff and escalating tension and raising of stakes and questioning what’s real and what’s not and how does something like this end for anyone involved?? it will get under your skin, i promise you that.
the plot isn’t the draw, because it’s less traditional plot than it is setting a scenario in motion and letting the characters bounce off its walls. the characters are part of the draw – the happily vacationing family at the center of the situation are eric and andrew and their seven-year-old daughter wen, whom they adopted from china as a baby, and they are as loving and enviable a family as you could possibly want if you were looking to illustrate the “terrible things happening to good people” angle. which is precisely the goal here.
in the calm before the storm, when andrew and eric are just being a goofy couple on the back porch – i remember reading that scene and thinking how well and naturally they were written; that their banter read like actual long-term couple banter with years of relationship history bubbling through subtextually, so it was even more effective once things started happening, because relatable characters being put in extraordinary circumstances naturally makes the reader question themselves – what would they do in eric and andrew’s place. me, i would freak the fuck out. period. like so:
this one plays it smart by never straying far from the realistic, in terms of character’s responses. it sticks pretty close to the realm of ordinary parental bravery, not liam neeson-badassery, which – although wonderfully entertaining, is only an option for people with a very particular set of skills. eric and andrew do not have these skills. but they do their best.
wen is also a great character. i don’t usually love kid-characters, but she’s written to be appealing and smart and occasionally bossy, as seven-year-old girls are, and seeing her struggle to process what is even going on and how to react contributes some excellent drama.
Maybe she should run like Daddy Andrew said, sprint through the room, dodge the turned-over furniture like a mouse through high grass, then onto the deck and outside and away. She can run fast. Her dads tell her that she is fast, so fast, all the time. And they tell her she is shifty. She knows their races are fixed for her to win, but Wen outlasting the catchers in their catch-me-if-you-can games until Eric and/or Andrew are bent over, hands on knees, gasping for air is legitimate. She is shifty. Wen loves this word. It means hard to catch. It means even better than fast; it’s a smart fast.
…She knows she’d make it out of the cabin without getting caught if she was to run, but where would she run to? She doesn’t want to accidentally get lost on the dirt roads that fork and branch away leading to nowhere or to worse places than here, and what if she has to ditch the road for the thick woods surrounding the cabin for miles and miles? Her dads were explicit in saying she could not go into these woods by herself under any circumstances because they might never find her again.
and that right there is the draw – moreso than plot or characters is mood. the tension and the shivery feeling that never goes away the whole time you’re reading this. what is the right choice when every choice is horrible? you can prepare for a lot of eventualities as a parent, from commonplace to very unlikely, but this one – no one’s ever written a pamphlet to get you through this situation.
the comparison to In a Dark, Dark Wood is a bit of a stretch. i mean, i guess they’re both kind of “bottle episodes,” so there’s a claustrophobic facet at play, except there’s little to no tension in ddw, and i couldn’t even locate a whiff of the horror or suspense it advertised. and i’m not trying to be a jerk about that book just because she’s never written me into one of her novels – it was okay, it was just a bit predictable and forgettable, while this one is nothing but unpredictable horror and suspense.
it’s actually much much more like 10 Cloverfield Lane, which is not a book at all, but it definitely explores the same general themes and conflict, where a stranger has a story too outrageous to be true, but oh, man – what if it is? and trust, doubt, and self-preservation shift and rattle and sustain an intense ambiguity for both characters and reader/viewer for the whole damn ride.
can’t say more, but this one’s a nailbiter.
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i got lost on my way to instagram…
