I recently bought a century-old Victorian house in the Hudson Valley after a decade in Brooklyn. There are mountain views and streets lined with mature trees; it's about as bucolic as you'd imagine. I'm now adept at lowercase ‘fixer-upper projects' like stripping 1970s wallpaper, staining a deck, and cursing the previous owners for installing 1970s wallpaper. The cursing feels productive, and the house, a marker of adulthood.
One unexpected development: movies and books about home invasion deliver a gut-punch like never before. I'm no longer the rent-stabilized New Yorker tittering at the onscreen rubes killed one by one in their cabin in the woods — now I'm the rube. Specifically the nerd rube: I die second to last.
This isn't limited to horror films. Even watching art-house fare like Darren Aronofsky's Mother!, I cringed less at the grand guignol filicide than at the houseguests' breaking of that gorgeous double-basin sink. (You animals!) This new sensitivity is reassuring. I worried about becoming complacent as I entered the propertied class, in addition to the usual worries of growing cynical with age. The sensitivity is a naked flank for art to locate and slowly pierce. In the case of two books published in the past year, the piercing came with a memorable twist of the knife.
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Paul Tremblay's The Cabin at the End of the World, his sixth book, was marketed as a thriller, with a cover blurb from Stephen King. On that count it delivers: you'll cancel dinner plans to finish reading it. The titular cabin is an off-the-grid lakeside idyll in northern New Hampshire. Eric and Andrew, along with their adopted seven-year-old Wen, have driven up from Boston for a weekend of lazing, reading, and not much else. There's no cell service and the nearest house is two miles down the road. Then four strangers arrive on foot, dressed in matching jeans and oxford button-down shirts, toting homemade weapons. They insist the family make a terrible decision; the strangers — two men and two women who speak in the benevolent, even tones of the zealot — can't leave until a sacrifice is made. One of them says, “I can only imagine how nervous you all are, and understandably so, at our arrival on your doorstep. This isn't easy for us, either. We've never been in this position before. No one has, ever, not in the history of mankind.”
The novel's perspective shifts between Eric, Andrew, Wen, and, briefly, between two of the strangers. This heightens and draws out the tension, though later chapters, narrated by both parents in the first person plural, distracts from the action. It's a minor quibble. Tremblay deftly illustrates how quickly regular life can become a nightmarish struggle for survival. He also knows a clear-eyed belief in an antagonist — that absolute certainty justifying all actions, however terrible — is uniquely troubling for someone self-aware: I don't want to do commit violence, but I must.
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