The Cabin at the End of the World (2018) by Paul Tremblay: Winner of the Horror Writers' Association Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel of 2018, this novel takes place at a remote vacation cabin in Maine. Gay couple Andrew and Eric and their pre-teen daughter Wen are enjoying their rural vacation when the End of the World starts, maybe, with a mysterious quartet of strangers arriving to tell them that the three of them have a pivotal role to play in the survival or damnation of all mankind.
I was a little surprised to see that this novel won the Bram Stoker -- until I remembered that the Bram Stoker has been increasingly wonky over the years with its selections. The Cabin at the End of the World isn't a bad novel. But it's not up to the standard set by Tremblay's first two horror novels, A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil's Rock.
As the novel ponders the capricious nature of gods and the horrifying precedents of all those Biblical stories that require the literal sacrifice of offspring, the machinery of its plot and the nature of that quartet, what they represent, and how they represent it... the whole thing ends up feeling like an episode of Supernatural, but with less philosophical depth and a lot less hand-to-hand combat.
When tragedy comes, it's moving, but perhaps not to the extent that a more conventional portrayal of supernatural forces might have allowed for. God's machinery and ideology are cheap and threadbare, but the novel itself almost becomes a representation of that concept rather than a critique of it, much less an in-depth examination.
Of course, maybe God isn't involved at all, and maybe the End of the World is not the End of the World. The novel's ending seems less ambiguous than those of Tremblay's first two horror novels. But there's still some wiggle room left for the reader to wonder whether the supernatural was ever involved, or just some folie a sept. Lightly recommended.
Disappearance at Devil's Rock (2016) by Paul Tremblay: In his follow-up to A Head Full of Ghosts, Paul Tremblay again walks a line between supernatural and natural horror with this story of a missing teen in small-town Massachusetts.
Troubled teen Tommy Sanderson -- introvert, zombie-obsessed -- disappears one night while out with his two best friends. He seems to have disappeared into the (real) Borderland State Park. The questions of 'why' and 'how' and 'where' will occupy the rest of the novel.
His best friends Luis and Josh are clearly hiding something. His sister seems to know something. And his mother is also haunted by memories of his father, who deserted them and then disappeared himself, into death after a single-vehicle accident.
Soon, mysterious apparitions (if they are apparitions) and messages start to appear. The mother has a vision of a gruesomely disfigured Tommy. And they everything seems to focus on a Borderland landmark called Devil's Rock.
Except it isn't really called Devil's Rock -- that's the name Tommy and his friends gave to it, without any real provenance. A story about the Devil lurking in the park since time immemorial also seems to be dubious. But strange things keep happening. And getting Luis and Josh to tell the truth about that night seems to become more and more difficult as Tommy's disappearance stretches on.
Tremblay's novel ends up being as much about the sort of secrets that can devastate families, and the sorts of problems that can snowball into horror for teenagers. There's more than a whiff of Lord of the Flies in some of the revelations towards the end of the novel -- but touches of what may or may not be the supernatural throughout also suggest a certain inevitability to Tommy's narrative.
The novel does a nice job of creating believable human evil, in teens or adults, without giving us anything along the lines of teen psychopaths and bad seeds. The entire enterprise tilts a bit more towards sorrow than horror, though there are several scenes of excruciating awfulness.
Tremblay notes in his afterword that the title and some of the novel's concerns are a nod to Picnic at Hanging Rock, with its mystery surrounding the disappearance of a school teacher and several students in Australia. Tremblay's book is ultimately more concrete than that mysterious film, and somewhat more conventional. Recommended.
A Head Full Of Ghosts (2014) by Paul Tremblay: A Head Full Of Ghosts feels like part of a fictional conversation that began with Ray Russell's The Case Against Satan (1962) and continued through William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1971) and on into all those found-footage possession and ghostly infestation movies in the Paranormal Activity, Insidious, and Conjuring franchises.
It's a superior novel that deals with its own possession case even as it also interrogates and discusses how possession cases have been represented in various media, whether presented fictionally or as "based on a true story." People don't remember now that The Exorcist itself was repeatedly framed by Blatty and the film-makers as being inspired by a "true story" of possession.
Like Great Expectations or To Kill A Mockingbird, A Head Full Of Ghosts is a retrospective narrative. 23-year-old Meredith "Merry" Barrett tells the "untold story" of her 14-year-old sister Marjorie's possession to a writer working on a book about that possession, a possession which occurred 15 years earlier when Merry was 8.
Tremblay's first bit of play here is to have the present-day of the novel be in "our" future, with the events of the past apparently occurring some time around 2014. He clearly wanted this possession to occur in "our" media world of the Internet, Twitter, YouTube, cell phones, and so on, and so forth. He does not invest "the future" with any flying cars or space colonies, so don't get too excited about that "future retrospective."
But wait, there's more! Posts from a blogger named Karen Brissette are interpolated into Merry's narrative. Brissette synopsizes and analyzes the possession, or more accurately, The Possession. That would be the six-episode reality series that made Marjorie and the rest of the Barretts a five-week media wonder.
Among other things, Brissette's blog evaluates The Possession as a narrative structured around father John's economic and social "failure" as he's a white, middle-class man who's been recently put out of work by downsizing and who, in his woes, has returned to a fervent, retrograde Roman Catholicism to explain Marjorie's condition which, as Merry's retelling begins, has been diagnosed as some form of mental illness -- perhaps incipient schizophrenia.
Sarah Barrett, still holding down a job, doesn't believe any of the religious crap her husband increasingly extols. But she's also rapidly being exhausted by being the sole breadwinner in the family while also trying to deal with the time and mental demands of whatever the Hell is making Marjorie's life miserable.
Got all that?
So as A Head Full Of Ghosts writes its own narrative of demonic possession, it also evaluates many of the narratives of possession Pop Culture has dropped on us over the years. And it evaluates the media. And religious faith, and religious mania. All while Tremblay creates convincing, complex characters -- especially with Merry and Marjorie.
There are several major interpretations of what "really" happened offered by the novel, but they are intertwined and not necessarily mutually exclusive of one another. Marjorie may really be possessed. Marjorie may be mentally ill. John Barrett may be possessed. John may be mentally ill. Merry may be possessed. Merry may be mentally ill.
At the very least, even Merry isn't entirely certain of the truthfulness of all her memories during that traumatic five weeks. And she's also aware that certain things remain unexplained or unsolved. The ambiguity Tremblay creates actually increases the horror of the situation. The Exorcist offered proof that there really was a demon at work inside Regan's head. A Head Full Of Ghosts offers no such certainty. Or does it?
The recent HBO adaptation of Gillian Flynn's 2006 novel Sharp Objects seems to have brought the generally lamentable fictional trope of the evil child/ teenager back into prominence, as seen in Flynn's book and in novels like Lionel Shriver's ludicrous, over-praised We Need To Talk About Kevin. Of course, The Exorcist's Regan is a forerunner of the mysteriously evil child/teen. So, too, the potentially possessed in The Case Against Satan. And on to the army of demon-haunted or demon-following or demon-possessed children in the Insidious movies and so on, and so forth.
However, Tremblay's Marjorie is a believable, sympathetic character whose ultimate spiritual and moral states are haunting and, possibly, left to the reader to decide upon. Merry, in her 23-year-old self remembering her 8-year-old self, is also a believable creation whose memories may or may not be believed. This is adult horror in the sense that it doesn't cheap out with a melodramatic teen monster collecting the teeth of her victims in a doll house. The ending chills the reader, and then chills the reader just a bit more. Highly recommended.
