But she did look at them again, and often. She requested they be put away because she would never look at them again. After her dads consoled her, she calmed down and gave them an oddly formal thank you for letting her look at the photos. Wen was so upset her hands shook and the tremors spread throughout her body. Wen was unexpectedly shaken by the photos and convinced she was, for the first time, looking at her real self and this real her was gone, forgotten, banished, or worse, that imperfect unwanted child was hidden, locked away inside of her somewhere. They had a set of five pictures of her lying on her back on a white blanket, awake and her balled-u p fists hovering next to her unrecognizable face. It took some convincing, but her dads eventually acquiesced.

Last fall, Wen begged her dads to let her see baby photos, the youngest ones of her that they had, the ones from before the surgeries and before they adopted her. The Cabin at the End of the World is a masterpiece of terror and suspense from the fantastically fertile imagination of Paul Tremblay.The fissure in her cleft lip went all the way up to her right nostril so the two sets of empty, dark spaces overlapped and became one. Thus begins an unbearably tense, gripping tale of paranoia, sacrifice, apocalypse, and survival that escalates to a shattering conclusion, one in which the fate of a loving family and quite possibly all of humanity are entwined. As Wen sprints inside to warn her parents, Leonard calls out: „Your dads won’t want to let us in, Wen. Three more strangers then arrive at the cabin carrying unidentifiable, menacing objects. Leonard and Wen talk and play until Leonard abruptly apologizes and tells Wen, „None of what’s going to happen is your fault”. Leonard is the largest man Wen has ever seen but he is young, friendly, and he wins her over almost instantly. One afternoon, as Wen catches grasshoppers in the front yard, a stranger unexpectedly appears in the driveway. Their closest neighbors are more than two miles in either direction along a rutted dirt road. Seven-year-old Wen and her parents, Eric and Andrew, are vacationing at a remote cabin on a quiet New Hampshire lake. The Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts adds an inventive twist to the home invasion horror story in a heart-palpitating novel of psychological suspense that recalls Stephen King’s Misery, Ruth Ware’s In a Dark, Dark Wood, and Jack Ketchum’s cult hit The Girl Next Door.

The cabin in the end of the world