Literature & Fiction
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The Cabin at the End of the World: A Novel
"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 King
The 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, 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
The 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, 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
Editorial Reviews
"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." - Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling
"You might not sleep for a week. Longer. [The Cabin at the End of the World] will shape your nightmares for months – that's pretty much guaranteed. That's what it's built for. And there's a very, very good chance you'll never get it out of your head again." - NPR
"The apocalypse begins with a home invasion in this tripwire-taut horror thriller. . . .[Tremblay's] profoundly unsettling novel invites readers to ask themselves whether, when faced with the unbelievable, they would do the unthinkable to prevent it." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"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 King
"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." - Michael Koryta, New York Times bestselling author of How It Happened
"A blinding tale of survival and sacrifice that matches the power of belief with man's potential for unbridled violence." - Kirkus Reviews
"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!" - Stewart O'Nan, author of The Speed Queen and A Prayer for t...
"You might not sleep for a week. Longer. [The Cabin at the End of the World] will shape your nightmares for months – that's pretty much guaranteed. That's what it's built for. And there's a very, very good chance you'll never get it out of your head again." - NPR
"The apocalypse begins with a home invasion in this tripwire-taut horror thriller. . . .[Tremblay's] profoundly unsettling novel invites readers to ask themselves whether, when faced with the unbelievable, they would do the unthinkable to prevent it." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"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 King
"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." - Michael Koryta, New York Times bestselling author of How It Happened
"A blinding tale of survival and sacrifice that matches the power of belief with man's potential for unbridled violence." - Kirkus Reviews
"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!" - Stewart O'Nan, author of The Speed Queen and A Prayer for t...
Readers Top Reviews
Dara BoatrightShe
I didn't actually realize that this was written by the same author as "A Head Full of Ghosts" until about halfway through, and I wish I'd realized it sooner so I could've skipped this one. My biggest problems with this title, in no particular order: - The prose is a slog to read through. It jumps back and forth between very plain straight-forward narration, and moments of very vague metaphorical language that I get the sense the author thought would come across as far more profound than it actually does. I'm making this one up, but think of a sentence like "I reached for my phone, the way a lover might reach across the bed for their partner after waking up from a nightmare in the middle of the night." Just woo-woo language shoved in for no real reason. - There are some very bizarre choices of perspective throughout. The book is written primarily in third-person, although several chapters are from the perspective of more than one person, somewhat confusingly jumping between them paragraph-to-paragraph. It gets more confusing in the final few chapters when it jumps to first person, and then to a very hard to read final chapter which is written in first person from the perspective of two individuals. An example sentence would be "John and Dave walked to the end of the room, and we thought about how familiar it looked to us." I guess I kind of get what Tremblay was going for here, but it's very hard and makes it hard to keep track of whose head you're currently inside. - I'm going to spoil a big moment here that I wish had been spoiled for me, as a parent of a young child. Read ahead at your own risk. A young child is shot in the face. If this were a substantial book that left a big impact on me, I'd have no problem with it, but for such a meaningless 250 pages I really could've done without it. - Extraordinarily disappointing ending that doesn't resolve anything and leaves the major questions of the book unanswered. I get that this is the point, and again, if this were a really substantial novel that left me with a lot to think about, I'd enjoy such an ambiguous ending that puts character before story. But it's not. It's a 250 page mystery thriller that failed to endear me to the main characters, and I just wanted to know what was happening. - The audio book is among the worst narrations I've ever had the displeasure of listening to. The narrator has a very strange cadence and inflection; their voice pitches down at the end of each sentence to a degree that it's very distracting. They also commit my audiobook cardinal sin: pitching their voice way down when speaking for a character with a deep voice. I have an imagination - I won't get confused if I hear someone saying a line for a 6-foot 300-pound man in a voice that's higher than that character would sound in reality. But when they pitch their voice so far d...
