Several days ago I finished Paul Tremblay’s most recent
novel, The Cabin at the End of the World.
It cemented my belief that Tremblay is one of the best fiction writers today,
full stop. He doesn’t need genre qualifiers. In some ways he’s a throwback,
using tight, unshowy prose to deliver stories in realistic settings with relatable
characters. In other ways he’s absolutely modern, one of the few writers I’ve
read to incorporate current technology and culture into his work in an
unforced, naturalistic way. A masterful storyteller, he may very well be at the
peak of his powers.
I tend to think of his last three novels—Cabin, Disappearance at Devil's Rock and
A Head Full of Ghosts—as a triptych. They
tell three distinct stories but are linked by their approach: ambiguity about
the supernatural. It is never made clear in the novels as to whether the
supernatural is present. A reader can interpret the stories either way and find
ample evidence to support their viewpoint. In a less-skilled writer’s hand,
this approach can easily come off as muddled and indecisive. Tremblay’s books
are anything but. Instead this very ambiguity, of which nearly every character
in the tales are aware, charges the story and drives the tension up higher by
making it easy for the reader to identify with the character viewpoint at any
given stretch in the story (all three books are told from multiple viewpoints.)
Exploring this extremely thin line between what we define as reality and what
we do not is something the horror tale is uniquely suited to do, and few do it
as well as Tremblay. I said above he doesn’t need genre qualifiers, and that is
true—but it also not a mischaracterization to call all three books horror.
Tremblay himself embraces the term and is active in horror literature culture, including
serving as a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards.
Tremblay has talked in interviews about his appreciation
for quiet, subtle horror tales. During the horror boom of the 70s/80s, there
were a number of writers, such as Charles L. Grant and Dennis Etchison, who
excelled at this type of tale and it’s possible to see their influence in
Tremblay’s approach but the results are far different. Cabin, for example, is a violent, gory novel, though the violence
is as far from the splatter aesthetic as one can get (Devil’s Rock and Ghosts
feature almost no violence at all.) The violence in Cabin is intimate, disturbing because of the real sense that no one
on either side of the fence wants any violence to happen. There is an
inevitability to the tale that heightens the tension. Did I mention tension? I
cannot think of a book I’ve read in recent years more tense than Cabin. I could
only read a handful of pages—maybe one, two scenes—before having to put it
down, needing to come up for air and assure myself that my world was still
intact. That everything was ok. Minutes later I’d pick it up again. This
push/pull lasted until the roughly the final third of the book, which I read in
a single sitting, the escalation of the story pushing me forward and at the
same time overwhelming me as I desperately hoped for a resolution for the
characters that didn’t destroy them (even as I knew such destruction was almost
certainly inevitable.) It was like being tossed about by a tsunami, the force of
the book rendering me a small piece of debris at the mercy of a savage ocean.
Yeah, it is a damn good book.
But to circle back to the common denominator—Cabin ends on a deliberately ambiguous
note, one that dares the reader to choose the degree to which the motivating
events in the book were “real.” The genius of the book is that you can easily
build a case for any degree on the scale, and Tremblay never weighs in. Some
readers may find such an approach frustrating, but tales like this carry a
greater impact, lingering in the reader’s mind long after finishing. In A Headful of Ghosts, the protagonist
watches as a gradual increase in bizarre behavior by her sister eventually
convinces their father that her sister is possessed. This “possession” and the
attempts to drive it away become the focus of a reality television show. Once
again Tremblay doesn’t take sides, refusing to explicitly state whether the
possession is “real.” We question the character’s perception of reality but the
book plants seeds of doubt as it proceeds. Tremblay recognizes that we will
bring our own biases to the tale, and skillfully turns this to his advantage. Ghosts is one of those rare tales that
sticks with a reader years later; it’s been four years since I read it and I
still turn it over in my mind. Again Tremblay refuses to wrap up the tale in a
neat bow, driving one to re-read the book to search for hints—hints that aren’t
there. Or are they?
Disappearance at Devil's Rock, published between Ghosts and Cabin
explores the effect this ambiguity has on the family unit (this is true in the
other two books as well, but is the focal point of Devil’s Rock.) A
tightly wound suspense tale, Devil’s Rock takes the basic story
framework of a missing child—one of the hoariest clichés of genre literature—and
makes it fresh by weaving a possible supernatural thread into the story via the
meta-text of the missing child’s diary entries. The reader is likely to
initially dismiss the supernatural threat in the diary entries, or question if
it is supernatural at all, but as the tale progresses the dismissal is likely
to turn into a “what if?” I will say that that Tremblay occasionally wobbles in
his handling of ambiguity in this book, lapsing into vagueness at times that
strongly conflicts with the story’s otherwise excellent pacing. It’s by no
means a fatal flaw and the book is a suspenseful page-turner, with perhaps the
best characterizations of the three books. It’s simply that Tremblay set such a
high standard in both Ghosts and Cabin that in comparison, Devil’s
Rock is sometimes found wanting. I still recommend it without reservation.
I get the sense
that Cabin marks the end of a chapter for Tremblay. I’ve nothing to base
this on beyond a gut feeling, but I think his next novel (it’s possible there
might be a collection of his short stories published in the interim) is going
to go somewhere completely new. I can’t wait to see where he goes next. I’m
clearly an admirer of his work, except for this one thing…
…Paul Tremblay is responsible for crushing my dreams of
publishing the second novel I ever wrote. A key location in my novel is named
The Café at the End of the World. Now, my café is quite different from Paul’s
cabin, but it would be simply impossible to name it anything else. So thank you
Mr. Tremblay, for crushing my dreams. I guess his stories are good enough that
I’ll forgive him…this time. (In all seriousness, I wrote the novel over a
decade ago, it’s not very good and does not deserve to see the light of day,
though I do play around with pieces of it from time to time. Mr. Tremblay did
not crush my dreams. How often is the second novel you write actually any good,
anyway?)
Joking aside, do yourself a favor and check Tremblay’s work
out if you’ve not done so. You might lose some sleep, but it's a small price to pay.
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