Rating - ⭐⭐⭐
"Seven-year-old Wen and her parents, Eric and Andrew, are vacationing at a remote cabin on a quiet New Hampshire lake. Their closest neighbors are more than two miles in either direction along a rutted dirt road.
One afternoon, as Wen catches grasshoppers in the front yard, a stranger unexpectedly appears in the driveway. Leonard is the largest man Wen has ever seen but he is young, friendly, and he wins her over almost instantly. Leonard and Wen talk and play until Leonard abruptly apologizes and tells Wen, "None of what’s going to happen is your fault". Three more strangers then arrive at the cabin carrying unidentifiable, menacing objects. As Wen sprints inside to warn her parents, Leonard calls out: "Your dads won’t want to let us in, Wen. But they have to. We need your help to save the world."
The Cabin at the End of the World is a horror novel by Paul Tremblay.
This book is 272 pages long...it took me several days to read it when I could have probably finished it in one sitting. That goes to show how much this novel captures my attention, i.e. not a whole lot. I've been waiting to dive into Paul Tremblay's work for a while now, and I know that this book was incredibly hit or miss because of the ending. So, naturally, curiosity got the best of me because I wanted to know what was up.
The ending surprisingly didn't bother me all that much, mostly because I was expecting it, but the rest of the story was just bland. I think that, even though the book is already on the shorter side, this may have been more effective if it was even shorter. I am talking 130 pages or less because a horror story can still be extremely effective in that amount of pages (Sour Candy being the prime example in this case).
What it really came down to then was the execution of the story. The premise and themes were interesting, but the story was too drawn out for me with very little happening. You are essentially stuck in a room with a group of characters I didn't care about going over the same scenario over and over again. That is why I said that the story could have been condensed, because of its repetitiveness.
Still, though, I didn't give this book any lower than a middle rating because it wasn't bad, just very bland.