the cabin at the end of the world book summary

They’ve chosen the cabin precisely for its remoteness, its lack of a decent cell signal, and its absence of wifi. The book’s premise is straight-forward: Eric and Andrew, a married couple from Boston, have just started their summer vacation at the eponymous cabin, which is located in Northern New Hampshire, not far from the Canadian border. With The Cabin at the End of the World, his extraordinary, white-knuckle-ride of a novel, Tremblay engages his concerns with the apocalypse through the form of the home invasion story. They’re the secular version of the apocalyptic elements found in the three major monotheistic religions, which have played such a prominent role in American Protestantism, in particular. They form a major subset of the field, reaching from Joe Hill’s recent The Fireman back through McCammon’s Swan Song, King’s The Stand, and Matheson’s I Am Legend, all the way to Shiel’s The Purple Cloud and further, to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. End of the world concerns are no stranger to horror narratives, of course. Sometimes, that end is precipitated by familiar means – a nuclear exchange, say – while in others, it is the result of more exotic causes: a plague of brain aneurysms, or a mysterious subsonic call which makes everyone march into the sea like so many lemmings.

Time and again, his stories treat situations in which the world we know is coming to an end. The Cabin at the End of the World, Paul Tremblay ( Morrow 978-0062679109, $26.99, 288pp, hc) June 2018.Īnyone who has followed Paul Tremblay’s short fiction, from the stories collected in the remarkable In the Mean Time, to “Where We Will All Be” in Joseph Pulver, Sr.’s The Grimscribe’s Puppets and “Swim Wants to Know If It’s as Bad as Swim Thinks” in Bourbon Penn magazine, knows that one of his preoccupations is with the apocalypse.

The cabin at the end of the world book summary