“A tremendous book―thought-provoking and terrifying, with tension that winds up like a chain. The Cabin at the End of the World is Tremblay’s personal best. It’s that good.” — Stephen KingThe Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts adds an inventive twist to the home invasion horror story in a heart-palpitating novel of psychological suspense that recalls Stephen King’s Misery… the home invasion horror story in a heart-palpitating novel of psychological suspense that recalls Stephen King’s Misery, Ruth Ware’s In a Dark, Dark Wood, and Jack Ketchum’s cult hit The Girl Next Door.
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. The Cabin at the End of the World is a masterpiece of terror and suspense from the fantastically fertile imagination of Paul Tremblay.
“Read Paul Tremblay’s new novel, The Cabin at the End of the World, and you might not sleep for a week. Longer. It will shape your nightmares for months – that’s pretty much guaranteed.” — NPR
“Gripping, horrifying, and mesmerizing.” — GQ
“A tour-de-force of psychological and religious horror.” — BN.com
“A blinding tale of survival and sacrifice.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Tremblay has a real winner here.” — Tor.com
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A tremendous book ― thought-provoking and terrifying, with tension that winds up like a chain. The Cabin at the End of the World is Tremblay’s personal best. It’s that good.
The Cabin at the End of the World is a clinic in suspense, a story that opens with high-wire tension and never lets up from there. The blend of human horror and human heart is superb. Paul Tremblay is rapidly becoming one of my favorite suspense writers.
The Cabin at the End of the World is a thriller that grapples with the timely and the timeless. I tore through it in record time. I just couldn’t wait to see where Tremblay was going to take me next.
Paul Tremblay loads emotion and tension into every paragraph on every page of The Cabin at the End of the World. It is a dream come true, a heartfelt, emotionally charged journey into our worst nightmares.
Paul Tremblay is the real deal! The Cabin at the End of the World is a heart-pounding, edge of your seat thriller that will leave you with one simple question: what would you do?
Think The Desperate Hours meets 10 Cloverfield Lane, but way, way stranger. With The Cabin at the End of the World, Paul Tremblay gives us a gloriously claustrophobic and gory tale of faith and paranoia. Signs and wonders and homemade battle-axes, oh my!
One of the most unique and amazingly written novels I’ve ever had the privilege of reading. Paul Tremblay is easily one of the greatest authors I’ve come across in the last few years. I’m usually incredibly slow when it comes to my reading but I had major trouble putting this one down, and then it was a struggle because of course on one hand I needed to know how it ended, but on the other I didn’t want it to ever end! He does such an amazing job at painting the perfect picture in your mind and making you feel all the fears and anxieties of the characters. I cannot recommend this one enough!
Tremblay has a knack for getting in your head, and then leaving you thinking about the journey long after the book ends. His characterizations made every player feel real, and brought the stakes higher with every page. The ending will have you talking for weeks.
From the start of “The Cabin at the End of the World,” Paul Tremblay captured my attention, and my emotional responses were on high alert. The setting is an idyllic, secluded cabin in New England, with a great view of a lake. A couple rents the place with their adopted daughter, Wen, who is introduced on page one, examining grasshoppers that she names and studies. Along comes a friendly bear of a man, Leonard, who helps her capture insects for her study. She knows she shouldn’t talk to strangers, but Wen finds an openness in the man’s face and a gentleness in his voice. However, she soon meets his three friends and learns why they’re stopping by the cabin.
Face-paced, evocative, and beautifully written, Paul Tremblay’s “The Cabin at the End of the World” will unnerve even hardened horror readers. This is not a formulaic “invasion” story, and by telling it from several perspectives, Tremblay expands the reader’s insight with all its psychological impact. Certainly it will leave many deep in contemplation well after closing this excellent book.
I think this is the best book by Paul Tremblay I’ve read, and that’s saying something because I’ve enjoyed all of his novels a great deal. This is a nightmare come to life, populated with real, fully rounded characters, and an allegoric, almost mythical tone. Bleak, but not without hope, it’s a highly entertaining read. Can’t wait to see what he does next.
This book seems to be polarizing a lot of readers. Or at least the Amazon reviews which seem to mostly love the book or hate it. I don’t know why. Personally, I would rank it as awesome! A HEAD FULL OF GHOSTS was just a tad better in my opinion but they are photo-finish close in that ranking.
The story: seven-year-old Wen and her parents, Eric and Andrew, are vacationing at a remote cabin. One afternoon four strangers arrive carrying menacing weapons and needing their help to save the world. The story the strangers tell is crazy; their actions are even crazier. Or are they sane behavior from people who have no choice. Suddenly Eric, Andrew, and Wen must make some difficult choices in order to survive.
I found the story amazing. It was scary and terrifying but in part because it was so thought provoking. What would I have done if I was in their place? Would I have made the hard choice earlier? And if so, when? Because Tremblay made the characters so real, it made everything have more impact. The hardships and pain yanked hard on my heart. I felt for both the family and the strangers. One of the other things that Tremblay does with his novels (or at least the three I’ve read so far) is end them all with a touch of mystery. Was there really something supernatural that occurred or not? In this case, strangers claim the family needs to help save the world. So by the story’s end, the world either has to be saved or be destroyed. But if the strangers are crazy, was the world really saved? Or were the claims deluded ravings from a madman? Unless the book ended with “The world then blew up.”, you can never be sure. And that’s what makes the story even better, that element of faith. Eric, Andrew, and Wen must have faith that the story is real, even if the messengers are crazy or demented. And as readers, we must decide who we want to believe. Taking Tremblay’s story at face value is easy; seeing possibly demented motives makes it scarier. These are the type of books that will leave me pondering for days afterwards. And that is why I loved it.
Very rarely do I go into any books with any sense of trepidation. More often than note, I go in by briefly reading the synopsis or having someone comment or message that if I liked X I would probably like Y.
‘The Cabin at the End of the World’ is a book that I see a lot of chatter about. Over on Facebook, it’ll often be brought up on the Books of Horror group. Someone will ask what people thought of it and there will be several hundred responses ranging from BEST BOOK EVERRRR!! to HATED IT!!
In my own social media bubble, I’ve developed a friendship with George Rason. On Twitter he is known as Book Monster aka sshh_ImReading aka the world’s biggest Tremblay fan. He’s always insisted I should read this book and give it a fair shake.
Which is how I approach every book, no matter what I’ve heard.
So, I dove into Mr. Tremblay’s book, which won the Best Horror Novel Award in the 2019 Bram Stoker Awards.
What I liked: Recently, I have fallen in love with the seemingly sparse detailed books. Those books that create a sense of anxiety and dread from page one, all the while you never know just what is happening in the larger world around them. ‘All Hail the House Gods’ by Andrew J. Stone. ‘Foe’ by Iain Reid,’ ‘Night Train’ by David Quantick and ‘Armageddon House’ by Michael Griffin immediately jump to the front of my mind.
‘The Cabin at the End of the World’ is another book in that seemingly post-apocalyptic style where something major is happening in the macro, but the story focuses on the micro. In this readers opinion, Tremblay does it masterfully.
The story follows the two dad’s, Andrew and Eric and their adopted daughter Wen. They’ve rented a cabin in the middle of nowhere to unwind and decompress. That is, until one day, four strangers show up and tell them, a decision must be made to prevent the world from ending.
We get seven total characters in this book and Jesus does Tremblay work them to the max. House/cabin invasion stories are always tension filled, but Paul decides to add in an existential additive with the ‘four horsemen’ of the apocalypse narrative and the harrowing thoughts of family sacrificing family for the greater good.
I loved the internal narrative monologues that he gave the reader, each person struggling with their current situation as well as the world at large.
This book also goes from chaos to carnage at the flip of the switch time and time again and some of these scenes are so brutal, it will make you cringe.
For me, personally, I thought the ending was sublime. This seems to be the make-it or break-it point of the book for most people, but I thought it worked out exactly how the story had went. We get a little not a lot.
What I didn’t like: Oddly, the only thing I really wasn’t a huge fan of was the Sabrina chapter closer to the end. I found the 1st person POV shift a bit jarring and the entirety of the chapter is almost a complete run on sentence of rambling thought. I does work well for the story over-all, but for me it was a bit of an abrupt shift.
Why you should buy this: Tremblay is a stunning writer and it’s insanity to really think this is my first book of his I’ve read. The book is sweat inducing and I couldn’t stop reading it. This was a book that I couldn’t wait to dive back into whenever I wasn’t reading it. I love when a book keeps you guessing about what is to come, even if you start to formulate your own answers to questions not yet asked.
I absolutely ate this book up and truly loved it. Mileage on the ending of each reader may vary, but for me, personally, I thought it was pitch-perfect.
The Cabin at the End of The Road has been on my Kindle shelf for a year. Finally, I dusted off the digital dust and finished the story in less than two days. This is the first book I’ve read by Paul Tremblay, and it won’t be the last.
The Cabin at the End of The Road is one of those books you pick up and can’t put down because the author knows how to keep you intrigued and questioning the outcome. Eric, Andrew, and their adopted daughter Wren captured my heart. They are a family with so much already against them, which makes the looming danger at their cabin door and perhaps beyond their vacation home in Vermont, even more heartrending.
This is not your typical home invasion. Yes, there’s bloody, brutal deaths, but with a twist. Four strangers arrive at the cabin with a mission given to them by an unseen entity. Believe in the Process, one of the antagonist’s mantra, resonated with me throughout this story. Blind faith, belief in something one cannot see, a belief so strong it spurs the antagonists to unimaginable tasks. But are their beliefs real? Can they obey on blind faith? If given the choice of saving the world or killing a loved one by four strangers who might be delusional, could you? Or are they telling the truth? Andrew and Eric, in disbelief, grapple with the surrounding insanity, questioning the validity of their captors. Can they believe just as blindly? Will they choose who dies?
The Cabin at the End of the World is an emotional ride, a page turner with an unpredictable ending that kept me guessing. Mr. Tremblay thanks for the horrifying, yet captivating read.
THE CABIN AT THE END OF THE WORLD takes a look at an American family and asks what are you willing to do to protect them? But this book asks that question in an unique way- right before it rips your heart out and stomps all over it!
Eric and Andrew take their daughter Wen on vacation to a remote cabin located on a lake in the woods of New Hampshire. It’s been deliberately chosen because it has no cell service, no internet, no nothing. They want to spend this time together, uninterrupted as a family. Unfortunately, their dream vacation came to a screeching halt when a large man named Leonard wandered into their front yard and started talking to Wen. Soon thereafter, three more people join him and together, they enter the cabin. Things go so downhill from there, it’s hard to even talk about. What happens after that? You’ll have to read this book to find out!
To give away any more about the plot would be spoilery, so I’m just going to talk about my thoughts and impressions and leave it at that. First, I love the way that Paul Tremblay writes families. He always provides honest insights and observations and as such, these parts of his writing are the ones that appeal to me the most. In this case, I loved 7 year old Wen SO MUCH, I just wanted to pick her up, give her a hug and go help her catch grasshoppers. Eric and Andrew were mysteries at first, but the one thing that soon became obvious about them was their love for Wen.
When things started to go sideways, I was captivated. I had so many questions but I expected and trusted the author to lead me through. Was I right to invest my trust? Yes and no. This is a very slight and “in general” type of spoiler, but just in case: (view spoiler)
One other thing did bother me: after the group of strangers entered the cabin, the pacing slowed down a bit and there was a lot of talking without much actual explaining, if that makes any sense. Having chapters from different character’s points of view helped me gain a little more insight as to what was going on in their heads, but I thought those portions were a little dragged out and for that, I deducted one star. (And to be honest, this issue is most likely mine, and mine alone.)
THE CABIN AT THE END OF THE WORLD is now my favorite among the works of Paul Tremblay. The writing here was powerful and my heart is still healing from the major break it suffered while I was reading this book, and as such: I highly recommend it!
*Thanks to Edelweiss and William Morrow for the e-ARC of this book in exchange for my honest feedback. This is it.*
The worst book I have ever read! I cannot believe it was even published
Terrible
Not a fan. Too much violence and questions left unanswered.
I wanted to like this book, kept reading hoping it would get better. It didn’t!
I read this in less than a day, I had to know what was going to happen! I gave it 4 stars because I’m not a fan of ambiguous endings
If you like that gut-wrenching ball of tension in the pit of your stomach, The Cabin at the End of the World is for you. Paul Tremblay’s latest novel is equal parts gripping, horrifying, and mesmerizing. Set during a gay couple (Eric and Andrew) and their adopted 7-year-old daughter Wen’s vacation at a remote New Hampshire cabin, the horrors begin almost immediately. Wen’s playing in the front yard of the home when she’s approached by a stranger. Then three more follow. The four home invaders say Eric, Andrew, and Wen are the only people capable of stopping an impending apocalypse. Are the home invaders crazy zealots or…? The Cabin at the End of the World will keep you awake reading and awake thinking.