The Cabin at the End of the World, by Paul Tremblay

I must provide some summary of plot to explain why I do not recommend Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World.  Andrew and Eric and their adopted daughter are vacationing in a remote and wild area of the Vermont wilderness.  Four strangers appear out of the woods and ask that they be admitted to the cabin in which the vacationers are staying.  The strangers insist they have something important to tell the vacationers.  After considerable resistance by Andrew and Eric, the four strangers—two men and two women—break in and subdue the vacationers.  They announce that they’ve been “ordered” by a person or persons unknown to inform the vacationers that unless one of them agrees to be killed by the others, to be sacrificed, the apocalypse will come and humanity will die. The vacationers refuse to believe what they’ve been told and refuse to offer the sacrifice.  One by one, each of the members of the four strangers is brutally killed.

Although Eric and Andrew at first refuse to believe what they’ve heard, gradually Eric begins to wonder whether it’s true.  He is a casual Catholic, occasionally goes to mass and Sunday services.  Andrew is a rationalist, an atheist, and he finds a way of disproving or casting doubt on everything the intruders say.  The novel becomes a series of debates between the intruders and the vacationers, and between Eric and Andrew, about faith and reason, belief and doubt.  In the end, only Andrew and Eric survive, and they must decide whether one of them should die, or whether they should continue to resist believing in the apocalypse the four intruders have promised.

There’s much repetition in this novel.  Arguments are repeated.  Andrew and Eric groan and moan in monotonous fashion.  The winds rise and the sky darkens and cable news reports on disasters occurring across the earth.  The four intruders turn out to be normal, likeable people (three of them, at least).  They don’t want to do what they’ve been ordered to do, but they have no choice, they’re forced to comply. The violent episodes are prolonged and brutal and finally become gratuitous.  The death of the little girl is horrible.  There’s no payback in this novel.  It’s not good enough to repay the reader’s suffering through all the rub-it-in-your-face brutality.  The author probably means the novel to be an exploration in the nature of faith, in the nature of a god who would kill seven billion people.  (One of the four finally admits that “God” has given them their orders).  Tremblay doesn’t offer hope or despair.  He leaves you with uncertainty, and that’s not good enough.