The Cabin at the End of the World: Book Review

I just finished reading The Cabin at the End of the World. This is a psychological horror novel written by Paul Trembley, and it is notable for its controversial ending. Some part of me thinks that this kind of book is best read with as little context as possible. I sat down to read it knowing only about the controversial ending and a very mild "spoiler" a so-called "friend" mentioned to me. I didn't even read the back of the book description to get the general idea. In the past, this general sentiment has motivated me to skip over the non-spoiler section of my reviews for most mysteries, but I guess if you want to avoid as much context as you can, you can just click off the review. I want wider appeal for some of my reviews, so I will include a spoiler-free section in this review.

Video: https://youtu.be/X7WeG1bvzB0

Non-Spoiler

The basic premise of Cabin is that a small family of three go on vacation to a cabin in the middle of nowhere in the hopes that they can get away from it all. They have no phone service, no internet, and little to no connection to the outside world. You already see where this is going, right? Wen, the adoptive daughter of the couple, is suddenly approached by a massive man who claims that he needs to sit down and speak to Wen and her two fathers about something incredibly important. And he has company. A few others are following behind him, and they don't exactly look to be the kindest sort.

This is the basic premise of the book and is essentially the back of the book description. What follows is a tense and exciting thriller/mystery/horror, where our central characters are challenged by a confusing and threatening set of strangers who have suddenly entered into their lives to make insane demands of them.

Characters

I thought the characters were well-developed, and I actually got some King vibes from the story for multiple reasons. Trembley did an excellent job communicating the characters to the reader. I never got the idea that any of them were interchangeable. Of the two dads, Eric and Andrew, they were opposites in some respects, and these differences played into the progression of the story in understandable ways. Of the strangers who show up on their doorstep, the characters were also distinct and well realized with at least one exception. Like King, the characters are among the best parts of the story.

One negative thing to comments on, however, is the execution of the character development. And this would be another way in which I think the story resembles that of King. The way in which the characters are developed seems kind of lazy, where the author dumps a bunch of backstory and goes on to simply tell who the character is to lay the groundwork. I am not trying to say there is no showing at all, but that the introductions of the characters were just too forward with how the information was delivered. As I said, it's kind of lazy, and I have the same thought regarding King's writing. I think it's because of King's omniscient perspective, though it's a bit more complicated for Trembley's book. I will touch on this in a little bit.

Story Development and the Ending

Before I get to my discussion of the story perspective and other related criticisms, I want to talk about the overall meat of the story and the culmination, upon which so much opinion seems to be hung.

As I have already hinted, I liked the story, overall. This is primarily because of the way that Trembley developed the central mystery of the story in a way that continually makes you question what is actually going on. Obviously, the inciting incident starts with the characters being forced to come to grips with an absurd proposition that is slowly given more credence. But never enough. You are always asking questions, and the characters do to, all behaving as you can imagine they would given the circumstances. The story is very realistic in that sense.

There is one part of the book that I thought was kind of cheap in this respect, but by the end of the story, Trembley managed to convince me that the choice to include it was actually worth it.

There is also enough violence and catastrophe to convince me that there were stakes within the story. There is nothing more annoying than a story that lacks the balls to do what is necessary and convince the readers that there is an actual threat. Trembley did something that I probably should have guessed, but did not actually see coming. Good stuff.

Finally, there is the ending. I mentioned at the outset that the ending was controversial and apparently a lot of people hated it. I personally really appreciated the ending of the story. I thought it was cathartic, which is the ideal way to end any story. In other words, you want a release of emotions that is in keeping with the kind of story that you are writing. You don't want the ending to simply be happy or sad or even bittersweet. Each story has its own notion of catharsis, and I think Trembley hit the nail on the head.

Description

As for some of my criticisms, I thought some of the descriptions were unwarranted and poorly executed.

With regards to the first criticism, there were some general descriptions of the cabin at the very beginning of the book that were, as I said, excessive. It's easy to understand why Trembley was so detailed in his description of the cabin; after all, the book is set at the cabin; but this is balanced by the fact that the cabin is really just a generic location to set a story at in the first place. If this location were something unique and important in terms of the geography of the place, then this would make sense, but this is just a cabin. You can get away with a bare-bones description. Truly. People easily project the details of the place onto the story and are even likely to ignore the specifics you provide anyway. I know I did.

There are multiple ways in which I thought that the descriptions were poorly executed, and this is more heavily weighted toward the beginning of the story, similar to the initial critique. First, when Trembley provided his description, it was like he was info-dumping an entire paragraph depiction—and it was almost like a list of facts, too. I don't want to read this. Giving the reader a visual is important, but like I mentioned above, some things are generic enough that we don't need the extra help. Indeed, sometimes descriptions can be used to create atmosphere more than they do a visual, and this would have been the perfect opportunity.

The other way in which I thought the descriptions were poorly executed might actually be more subjective. I can understand why Trembley chose to write his descriptions in this way, but it kind of annoyed me. What I am referring to is how Trembley seemed to shoehorn description into the action. The inciting incident has happened, and Trembley suddenly puts all of that on pause so he can lay out some of this description, like his detailed account of what the cabin looked like. This gave me whiplash, as the story was already taking off, and then this boring-af description is suddenly thrown in. The same can be said with some of the character information. Before, I mentioned that the character info was just dumped on the reader like King often does, and this is another example of what I am talking about, where the story has to stop in order to give a quick crash course on who Daddy Eric is.

As I said, I can understand why Trembley did this. He did not want to lose readers by trying to worldbuild their little cabin and develop the backstory for the characters in the beginning. Instead, he wanted to get the plot moving as soon as possible, and then had to force in all this relevant information before the story got moving too fast. There is a trade-off here. Even still, I think there are better ways to do this than literally mid action, as it seemed to be in this book.

Perspective

Another thing I want to talk about is the perspective of the story. I was a bit confused with what the perspective of the story was. At the same time, I don't really get the sense that Trembley let his perspective slip in places. Much of it felt deliberate. Without spoiling, I can say that the story kind of felt like a cross between omniscient and third person limited, with a little bit of first person thrown in at specific points in the story.

I think the story was written in third person limited, first and foremost. Like Martin's ASOIAF, sections of the story are literally named after the characters that you follow for that section. You see the story from their eyes and it is clear that you are supposed to have this constraint. At the same time, there are parts that seem to be more omniscient than limited. This is tied to the character backstory info dumps that I talked about before. At many points in the story, the character info is given to the reader, rather than shown, and this is just odd given how limited the perspective seems to be.

I won't give actual examples, but a quick and dirty mock example would be something like this: "Jason was a very talkative man." This is telling the reader something about the character, rather than showing. But does this work for the limited third person? As someone who almost always writes in the third person limited, I would only tell the audience something like this if I wanted to share what the character thought of himself. So, the point would not be that Jason is actually talkative, but that Jason perceives himself as someone who talks a lot (though, there is definitely overlap). It should go without saying that I generally avoid statements like this altogether, and would probably clean up the wording a bit if I did decide to do something like this. The third person limited seems to force you cut out your telling, and it forces you to show, at least when it comes to your perspective characters. It is the omniscient view that allows you to go wild with telling. King uses the omniscient, so his lazy execution of character development makes sense, at least. But Trembley's creates this confusing fusion of different perspectives, and I cannot tell if it is on purpose. I lean toward "no."

I also mentioned that there are some parts that are in the first-person perspective, and even in the first-person plural at points. In contrast to the last point, this choice does seem deliberate, though I have no idea what the point of it is. There are literally parts of the story where Trembley refers to two specific characters as "they" collectively, and then uses "we" in reference to those exact same characters at a different point in the book. Why? This is such an obvious thing, but I still don't grasp the purpose. Maybe it's to showing that they are growing toward one another? Maybe.

Related, another character is exclusively written from the first person (from what I remember), but I still don't know why. Those sections of the story had a particular feel to them—they felt very subjective and uncertain, so that seems to be the obvious answer. But then there are other characters told through the usual third person limited, and they are also incredibly subjective. Maybe they aren't subjective in the same way. I could posit that the point of the former was to emphasize the subjectivity, while the latter was to make what might be subjective seem objective, and that this was the reason for the choice, but I am not sure. Or perhaps it's because the character was essentially talking to the other characters, and this makes the whole sequence seem like a gushing report.

The commentary on perspective is only really a criticism for the very first part, where I talked about the third person limited and the omniscient perspectives. The parts about the first-person perspective, both singular and plural, are more so questions to ponder than something that really annoyed me.

Themes

Finally, I want to brush upon the themes of the story, which seem to be uncertainty, connection, free will/determinism, and awareness—in order of importance. I will save the heavier discussion for the spoiler section, however. Consider that incentive to read the book. What I will say here is that I liked the themes, particularly the first one. I think this book captures the human capacity to delude and become ensnared in things they don't entirely understand, and I also think the book captures the superstitious side of humanity by making the readers themselves question what they take for granted.

Conclusion

Overall, I thought the book was great, I will give it an 8/10.

Spoilers

There are only a few things that I want to talk about in full, spoilery detail.

The Mystery

First, I mentioned that liked how the mystery was developed and how the uncertainty was maintained. The uncertainty was the primary theme of the story. This is primarily because there really is no answer to the questions asked. I know that some people hate endings where none of the mysteries are resolved, but while that usually does not work for me, I think it did work in this story. It fits neatly within the theme, forcing the readers to experience the epistemological horror that our characters were subject to.

And I could honestly tell that things were beginning to move in that direction based on how the reveals were unfolding. The evidence for the apocalypse was always staggeringly weak, but the evidence was still enough to make you question the likelihood of coincidence, with each iteration becoming more unexplainable. If I hadn't concluded that this was strategically written to be indeterminate—if I were a character in the story, let's say—then I would probably be forced to consider a third position. Perhaps there are strange occurrences happening, even of the supernatural variety, but even then, it's reasonable to think that the four invaders were mistaken about some things in their interpretation of their strange experiences. In other words, the apocalypse still might not happen, even after granting that they all had those experiences.

The Ending

I mentioned in a joke before that I was "spoiled" on the ending. That is a bit of an exaggeration. She told me she thought the ending was fitting because it fit with the theme of uncertainty that was central to the book. That doesn't directly spoil things, technically, but it was not difficult to put together the pieces as I got started with the story and learned the basic premise. The moment she mentioned this to me, I knew the central mystery of the story would be left open ended, and I didn't even need to start the book. This is why I usually try to go in as blind as possible. Even vague "spoilers" are sufficient to ruin certain aspects of the story by putting together the pieces.

Perhaps this affected how I saw the ending. Maybe I would have hated it if I had not known that the answer would never be provided. I can't really know with much certainty. That said, the way the story develops was as I mentioned above: no actual evidence of the apocalypse, but still having unlikely occurrences that can't be waved off as coincidental. I might have been able to infer the ending on some assumptions without the spoiler, but I still don't really know.

Another final thing regarding the ending that is rather specific is that I liked how the future tense was used in the final paragraphs of the story. Not only does the story cut off before anything final happens, not only does the story use the first-person perspective in this part, but the story talks about what the characters "will" do. The future tense and the first-person perspective interact to make the story that much more uncertain: is the author telling us what will happen, or are the characters telling themselves what they think will happen? Who knows?

FAILURE!

One thing that was "funny" was that before Wen was shot, I started speculating on what might happen. I had just read the portion of the story where Wen was remembering how her fathers were consciously talking to her about the gun and how she is never to touch it. I immediately started to think that there might be a scenario where the gun lands near Wen, where one of her fathers is being strangled, and Wen would have a chance to pick up the gun and use it to save her father; but Wen would balk because of the discussion they had, leading to the death of that father. Maybe this would have been an even more diabolical development in its own way, perhaps an idea for my own stories. But instead, Wen is killed, and because of the actions of the adults around her. So, I failed to anticipate that, at least.

Determinism and Loss of Awareness

The final thing I want to talk about is the intersection of determinism and loss of awareness. In philosophy, there is an acknowledged tension between free will and the capacity to know things (especially absolute knowledge). The general idea is that if you are omniscient, then you know how you will behave in the future. This opens up the question of whether it is possible to choose to behave differently from what your knowledge says. Consider an omniscient being that knows that they will leave the house for work at 9 tomorrow—the question simply asks if they can choose to stay home. It seems not. If they choose to stay home, then they did not know they were going to leave the house, meaning they are not omniscient. If they did know they were going to leave the house, then they must leave the house when the time comes, suggesting they have no free will in their choices. This question often comes up in discussions about the Christian God and whether he can have free will if he is all-knowing.

There is another variation of this general idea that relates to this story, as well. The notion of omniscience does not have to be invoked at all. All someone has to have is certain knowledge of a specific kind, and the same problem will emerge. Going back to the example from before, a person simply has certain knowledge that they will leave the home for work at 9—omniscience does not have to be invoked at all—and the same problem will emerge. You cannot have certain knowledge that you will leave home for work at 9 and also have free will, it seems.

When one of the intruders (Sabrina?) mentioned that she tried to stay home, but simply woke up in a cab halfway to LAX the next day, I was reminded of this philosophical question. Loss of awareness is one of the ways in which you can suggest determinism and even allow people have certain knowledge, all the while. Sabrina knew she had to go to the Cabin and save the world but was unable to escape it because of determinism.

The question then becomes: how is this portrayed? Determinism is very unintuitive, and the idea that Sabrina can't just choose to not go is ridiculous on its face. Loss of awareness is one way this can be worked around. She simply woke up having made the decisions she had wanted to avoid. If I am being honest, while this is an interesting solution, I also think it is a rather cheap way to portray this. There are other ways to show this that I think might have been even more interesting, even if they were more involved. Basically, the character becomes more emotional and impulsive and slowly rationalizes themselves out of making certain choices over time, basically showing that they have a nature and make the decisions they do for a reason. This would be something hard to execute—and the determinism theme of the story was rather peripheral, anyway—so I know this is too much to ask. This is just what I had in mind while I was reading the story.

Conclusion

Overall, I thought the book was great, I will give it an 8/10.