Everyone loves a good hypothetical.
Would you do a truly awful thing if it meant
saving someone’s life? In The Cabin At The
End Of The World, author Paul Tremblay
twists a classic home invasion opening into a
nightmarish and much broader scenario, all
within the confi nes of a single holiday home.
Four strangers tie up Andrew, Eric and their
daughter Wen and tell them that one needs to
kill another, or the world will end. The longer
they delay, the more earth-shattering events
will occur until it’s fi nally too late.
Was the possibility of the end of the
world the starting point for the idea?
The idea for The Cabin At The End Of The
World started with my drawing, well, a
cabin in one of my ‘idea’ notebooks. It was
something I doodled unconsciously, but when
I saw my little cabin I thought about the ‘home
invasion’ subgenre of horror. It’s my least
favourite subgenre, which, ultimately, was
the motivation behind writing the book. I was
excited by the challenge of writing a home
invasion story that I would want to read.
I thought the possibility of an apocalypse
mixed with the home invasion story would
be an interesting way to raise the stakes. That
knife-edge of pre-apocalypse has long been
a fear of mine. As a child of the Cold War
Eighties, I’ve long feared civilization’s sudden
and violent end. Many of my earliest short
stories featured our imagined end and a few
even described ambiguous scenarios that may
have been precursors to an apocalypse.
Ambiguity and unreliability were big
factors in Head Full Of Ghosts, are they
elements that you enjoy playing with?
Ambiguity and unreliability are wonderful
fodder for a horror story. Or any story for that
matter. Memory, identity, even reality are a
lot more malleable than we like to believe.
Existence is rooted in personal and existential
ambiguity. So many of my favourite works of
literature are about the unsure footing of our
daily lives. How do we live through this? How
result is that the reader might be more closely
in tune with the uncertainty the characters
would be feeling. I hope it works as a
purposeful refl ection of the daily dread and
anxiety of our age of misinformation.Are social commentary and parallels
with real-world events and current
fears something that come out
gradually, or are they ingrained from
the very beginning?
Every story is different for me. More times
than not subtext or underlying themes form
organically. Or maybe a better way of saying it
is that I’m usually discovering what a story is
about as I’m writing it. However, with Cabin
the subtext was there from page one. I wrote
50 pages and a plot summary during the 2016
United States presidential election season. I
wrote the rest in the election’s aftermath. My
goal was for Cabin to be a horror/suspense
novel, but one that also (without getting too
didactic) worked as an allegory for our current
socio-political anxieties.Do you remember what your fi rst
encounter with the horror genre was?
Growing up outside of Boston in the days
before cable TV (a dark, terrifying age, I know),
there was a local program that ran on Saturday
afternoons called Creature Double Feature.
The fi rst fi lm was generally a Kaiju fi lm (which
I adored) and the second fi lm was either a
Hammer production or a black and white,
Fifi tes or Sixties exploitation fl ick. The second
movie always scared the hell out of me. One
of my favourites from those Creature Double
Feature days was Quatermass And The Pit (or,
as it was called in the US, Five Million Years
To E a r t h). I used to have dreams/nightmares
featuring the giant, glowy alien head from that
movie. That movie still holds up well. I’d love
to see it rediscovered by modern audiences.The Cabin At The End Of The World
by Paul Tremblay is available now
from Titan Books.does anyone live through this? I think horror
can really dig at those questions.Did the invaders evolve over time or did
you always know that they were going
to have to be ‘reasonable’?
Yes, very early in on in the process I knew that
my invaders wouldn’t be emotionless monsters.
I wanted them to be as recognisable as the
protagonists. There’s no one correct way to
write a horror story, obviously, but more often
than not I fi nd approaching all the characters,
including the villains or the characters who
do horrible things, from a starting point of
empathy is an effective way to build dread and
create the effect of horror. Again, there are no
absolutes, but I generally fi nd the characters
who do terrible things yet seem reasonable (or
believe that they are reasonable) are scarier
than faceless, implacable villains.
With Cabin, I thought what most of the
strangers were going through (without
getting too spoilery) was a horror and worth
exploring. I did want the tension of having
these people who view themselves as good,
as ‘everyday people’ (with that statement
being loaded with as much baggage as
possible) feeling like they had no choice but
to participate in such an obviously wrong or
immoral event. The idea of truly believing one
has no choice in what one is doing (or is about
to do) is a horror, and a terrifying one at that.One of the key points is that Andrew is
never going to believe the group, and
the group is (almost) unwavering in
their belief... Is a lack of communication
between different groups something
that scares you in real life?
With A Head Full Of Ghosts and The Cabin
At The End Of The World, I attempted to
build ambiguity by throwing a glut of data
at the reader instead of solely relying upon
unanswered questions and loose ends. In both
books you are bombarded with compelling
evidence on both sides of the supernatural/
non-supernatural argument. Hopefully theBOOK CLUB
InterviewONE MINUTE
TO MIDNIGHT
Paul Tremblay is back with a horrifying new novel about a family facing a
terrible choice that may or may not mean the end for humankind. We talk
apocalypses, miscommunication and The Cabin At The End Of The World...
WORDS JONATHAN HATFULL090 |