Cabin Pressure

Hello, readers! I have returned from GenCon (and have recovered enough to start getting back into a routine here). I figured I'd get started with the book that occupied my flight there and back, a new horror novel from Paul Tremblay called The Cabin at the End of the World.

This is possibly one of those books that's better experienced the less you know about it. It's also a very slim read, at just over 200 pages, so there's really not much hinting at the plot without digging well between the covers. Try this: a married couple, Andrew and Eric, rent a cabin far out of the way in New England, taking their adopted daughter Wen for a vacation. A group of four strangers arrive and proceed to torment the family. But it is not their wish to inflict physical harm; instead they bring an emotional torment, over what they say the family must do.

This is one of those books that seems tailor-made to become a movie. It's a compulsive page turner, and has a very tight unity of time, place, and action. Sure enough, I checked and it's already been optioned by a studio and is in development. (Getting strong reviews and endorsements from the likes of Stephen King will do that.) Tremblay's writing is strong in how it conveys a sense of space, and it's easy to roll a version of a film on the movie screen in your mind.

The scenario posed in the book will definitely strike fear into many readers. It goes right to the core of a parent's anxiety over protecting their child, and punches repeatedly. The opening pages in particular are a rather masterful unveiling of slow, creeping dread that definitely hooked me for the whole book.

The fact that the protagonists are a gay couple with an adopted daughter is definitely a plus. Though the character back stories do make this a salient point in the narrative, the simple fact is it didn't have to be this way. Tremblay could have chosen any couple with one child and written this book largely the same. It's representation done exactly right -- these characters are in their situation and also are gay; it doesn't define them or the story.

But there are some quirks to Tremblay's writing style that chipped away at my enthusiasm. Flashbacks and current action are interwoven tightly throughout the novel, but always with a shift between present tense and past tense verbage that always caused me a mental bump in the transition. He plays even more fast and loose with shifts in narrative perspective. Chapter headings identify a "perspective character," but the line is definitely blurred between how omniscient vs. subjective the writing gets. Things get very strange later in the book when two characters share perspective in a chapter; the actual sentence structure goes first person with strange "we"s and "us"s, implying odd, simultaneous thought. For me, at least, this does not work at all.

And one final word of warning. You need to be comfortable with ambiguity if you read this book. It is very much the nature of this story that you're never supposed to be sure what the the Real Truth is. Different characters have very different takes on it. There's a logical explanation that works, and a quite fanciful one. There are offshoots from the main narrative similarly steeped in uncertainty. And you will not get closure on all of it. I absolutely get what Tremblay is going for here. It fits the tone of the book, and in theory leaves readers to fill in the gaps. I'm also not certain I felt completely satisfied in the end.

But the story is, undeniably, suspenseful and chilling. I deliberately picked up the book without learning much about it, after simply hearing it was effectively horrific. On that promise, it delivers fully. I give The Cabin at the End of the World a B.