Gabino Iglesias’s Coyote Songs is a novel of borders, set at the intersection of horror and noir, bound together by prose as glittering and sharp as broken glass. With The Outsider, Stephen King wrote a narrative as gripping as any he has ever produced, a white-knuckle ride in which all his considerable gifts as a storyteller are on display. Tremblay’s book is one of a number demonstrating the vibrancy and variety of the contemporary horror novel. Yet Tremblay never allows the tension to slack, and the result is a tour de force which accomplishes the rare feat of an ambiguous ending that succeeds. It’s possible to read the novel as a reflection of the clash of cultures that has gripped the United States during the last couple of years, though the conflict between religious extremism and cosmopolitan humanism is not new. Of course, the family resists the bizarre injunction, but televised reports appear to confirm the strangers’ claims.
Leonard, the strangers’ spokesperson, tells Eric, Andrew, and their daughter, Wen, that God demands a fearsome task of them: in order to avert an escalating series of disasters, the family must decide on one of them to kill as a sacrifice. Acting on what they claim is divine inspiration, a quartet of strangers traps a couple and their adopted daughter in the remote cabin to which they’ve come for their summer vacation.
It’s one of those novels which emerges as a kind of allegory for its historical moment. The Cabin at the End of the World cements the claims of its predecessors. The result was work that could be enjoyed by an audience familiar with horror through its popular texts and appreciated by those whose knowledge of the field ran deeper. With his previous two books, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock and A Head Full of Ghosts, Tremblay announced himself as among the most ambitious of his generation of horror writers, producing novels that drew on the examples of the genre’s great practitioners, King and Jackson, while blending them with a 21st- century sensibility. Novels first, then: Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World is the novel of 2018.
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