Holy. Smokes. This book!!! Definitely in my top reads of the year. I couldn’t put it down. This book is my third book by Paul Tremblay A Head Full of Ghosts (which I liked okay) and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, which I thought was great, but this one is his best, so far. I absolutely loved it.
From Goodreads: 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 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.
Absolutely no spoilers because this book would be completely ruined by them, but the tension presented and the horror this family faces, both physical and psychological, is so terrifying. The story is told from multiple characters, which makes the plot even more awful because you see the events from so many different perspectives. I can’t really go into more, however. Tremblay is just a high school math teacher who happens to write books. At this point, I’m confident he could quit his day job and be just fine. I can’t wait to read his newest, Survivor Song.
Pleasant Nights 