PAUL TREMBLAY TAKES TO THE CABIN AT THE END OF THE WORLD

BY JONATHAN THORNTON

 
Paul Tremblay is the author of the critically acclaimed horror novels A Head Full Of Ghosts (2015), Disappearance At Devil's Rock (2016) and Cabin At The End Of The World (2018). His thought-provoking and deeply disturbing stories are both engaging character-driven horror thrillers and witty metafictional meditations on horror as a genre. They have been praised by everyone from Stephen King to Nina Allan. Paul Tremblay was at Edge-Lit Festival in Derby, and was kind enough to speak to Gingernuts Of Horror about his writing.

Your latest novel, Cabin At The End Of The World, is out now with Titan Books in the UK. Can you tell us a bit about it?

Sure. The novel opens with two men who are married, Andrew and Eric, and they have an adopted daughter named Wen, she's about seven or eight years old. And they decide to rent a cabin in Northern New Hampshire, purposely remote, cause they're urbanites. They want to unplug from Wi-Fi and cellphones. For this book I needed that set up for a horror story! And while they're there these four strangers sort of show up and demand to be let into the cabin because they say that they need the family's help to help prevent the end of the world. And then it goes from there.

It's a very intense novel. At any point in the book did you feel, is this going too far?

The book is my take on the home invasion genre. It's funny, when I had the idea for the book, it was sort of a challenge, because that is typically my least favourite sub-genre of horror. There are some home invasion stories I like. It's a truly terrifying concept. So that's part of it. But too often I think the Hollywood treatment of the home invasion story is dependant upon almost torture, and I don't think it's done well in that way. So there's certainly violence in my book but I tried to treat the violence with what I would call respect. What I mean by that is, I treat both the victim, whether or not he or she survives, but also the people who witness the violent act, even who perpetrate that violent act, to try to respect that experience, that they're forever changed by it. So with the home invasion story it's sort of unavoidable that there is violence. Without being spoilery, neither of my publishers pushed back on it. So hopefully that means that even though some bad things happen I sort of treated it in an OK way.

 It's very claustrophobic, almost entirely set within that cabin.

Yeah. I'm no playwright but with that book, I tried to envision that this could almost be written like a stage play. Which I thought would help make it more intense and horrifying because it is such an enclosed space. It was fun to have the cabin, this really enclosed space, surrounded by this expanse of wilderness. So it's a neat little dichotomy, that even though they're in the middle of all this big stuff, it's all contained in this tight little place.

This book sees you play with home invasion and cabin in the wood tropes, and A Head Full Of Ghosts plays with both possession films and reality TV. What is it that attracts you to approaching these horror tropes in such a distinct way?

I'm a lifelong horror fan, and particularly movies was actually my first love, before I got to reading and writing a little bit later. To me part of the fun of horror, or any genre, is that when I'm writing a horror story I'm joining this decades long conversation. And hopefully when you write a horror story, if its successful enough, not only do you get to be in conversation with a previous work, maybe now the previous work gets looked at slightly differently. To me that's part of the fun and challenge of it. Like, how would I do a home invasion story? That was like a fun challenge. Obviously you want to have like a few twists to it. If you're going to be in the horror genre you might as well use it right? I don't think the tropes should be avoided, I think they should be embraced and maybe, if not reinvented then at least tweaked or looked at in a different way.

Your books also play with ambiguity. Cabin In The Woods could be read as an apocalyptic tale, or it could be a bunch of crazy cultists invading a house. Similarly A Head Full Of Ghosts is all about that bit - "Why is my sister's schizophrenic breakdown not enough for you?"

That line that you quoted, I'm happy to hear. To me I feel like that's, if there was such a thing, the thesis statement for the book. Ambiguity is something I've always been attracted to. I feel like that reflects our existence. Our existence is a lot more ambiguous, when we think about it a lot it starts to make us feel uncomfortable, or at least it does for me. As a horror writer I just think that's an endless territory to explore. And I thought for A Head Full Of Ghosts and Disappearance At Devil's Rock and now Cabin, that it made a nice way for those three books to make this arc, sort of fit together. I can't do the same thing for every novel, the next novel I'm going to try to do something a little bit different, but I thought it was kind of cool to have all three novels be about families in crisis, all three novels have this maybe ambiguous supernatural element.

And as you say, they're all linked by the family experience.

Absolutely. So many of my stories, not all of them, but even some of the short stories, are about either kids or parents being parents for the first time. Sometimes flipping the point of view. Again like ambiguity I think it's like a limitless thing to explore. Being part of a family is one of the few almost universal experiences that we all have. People like to relate to that in a story.

A Head Full Of Ghost plays around with ideas around memory and perception.

Yeah. I lob memory and identity with our sort of ambiguous existence. Because there are so many studies out there, we know our memories aren't perfect, and they change over time. And your identity is so reliant upon your memory, so how malleable is our identity? When you think of that in terms of a horror story, or me it gets the wheels turning.

All three novels are in dialogue with horror, but A Head Full Of Ghosts is particularly in dialogue with The Exorcist and the Catholic guilt and misogyny that crops up in so many of those early possession stories.

That was definitely my initial reaction to the idea of writing a possession story. Cause I grew up in New England, it's a very Catholic area. And I was Catholic up until the age of seven or eight. I still teach actually in a Catholic school, which is weird. So I've been around it my whole life. But that was actually a big part of it because the classical exorcist tale, the Blatty story relies so heavily, not only concept but almost the belief in it. With A Head Full Of Ghosts, my first idea was, no I'm going to write a secular, sceptical exorcist story. And as it morphed it became more about the ambiguity but I still wanted to criticise the historical treatment of women who were obviously just mentally ill but they had to suffer through these exorcism attempts, particularly in the 1800s and early 1900s when it was really bad. And how it's treated in the film where the priests show up and obviously they're the good guys who save the day, whether or not there's like a twist at the end. I wanted to have the priests show up and make things worse.

You describe the house in A Head Full Of Ghosts and the cabin in Cabin At The End Of The World in a lot of detail near the beginning. It's almost like the magician setting up a trick - nothing in this hand...

That's funny, I didn't even realise I did that but you're right. In the first couple of pages of A Head Full Of Ghosts that's right, there's a big description of the house, in Cabin it's like early in the second chapter. Thank you for telling me that! That's sort of the fun part of writing sometimes. The idea of trusting your subconscious. You put stuff in in a certain order and sometimes I can't fully explain why it just feels right. That's the sort of big leap I think you have to take, is to trust your subconscious. You'll figure it out in the end, or even if you don't it's just right cause it sort of works.

At the centre of all of the books is this adult fear that something is happening to your kid and you can't help them.

No absolutely. It definitely reflects my anxieties as a parent, about my children. It's funny, I first got serious about writing right after my first child was born. For a few years before that it was more like just a hobby. In a weird way though I was super busy now cause I was a parent, it really gave me a lot of inspiration to work through this new world of being a parent which to me is still kind of bizarre. The different milestones you go through as a parent, my son is a year away from going to college. It's depressing and blowing me away and it's exciting but how old he's become, and how old I've become!

Both A Head Full Of Ghosts and Cabin At The End Of The World have been optioned for film.

Yeah. It's my first time. I have no official say in the goings on, which is fine, but A Head Full Of Ghosts has been optioned by Focus, there's two producers and it's been like a much longer process. They've had it for three years, but it still sounds like they're excited about making it. and they have actually have hired a director, Oz Perkins, and he directed The Blackcoat's Daughter, and I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In This House - the second film is on Netflix. He's actually the son of Anthony Perkins. So I'm very excited. Nothing official yet but fingers crossed, it sounds like things are starting to move a little bit forward. With Cabin it's very early in the process but I did actually just recently when I went to Washington, went to hang out with two gentlemen who worked on the screenplay. They were very nice and sort of seemed like well thought, deep thinking kind of guys and it was wonderful talking to them. They were asking me lots of questions about Cabin and it sounds like they want to keep me in the loop, which is nice. So I'm super excited, hopefully it happens.

And definitely with Cabin you could almost stage that...

Yeah. I mean nothing is easy to adapt, I don't think, and even with that there's a lot of interior stuff going on but yeah, movie-wise all you need is a cabin. And maybe some of the stuff on the television but you can work your way around that.

As well as writing, you're a juror on the Shirley Jackson Award.

I haven't been a juror for a while. The first few years I was a juror, but I basically just help run behind the scenes. Cause we get new jurors every year or so. So actually I think this is our eleventh year, which is kind of hard to believe. It's a lot of work at times but it's also a really sort of wonderful experience, to find how many people have been inspired and affected by the work of Shirley Jackson, which is really cool. Really different kinds of authors that you wouldn't necessarily expect.

Has that experience on the critical side fed into your writing?

Yeah it all helps. I can be fairly described as a magpie kind of writer, I like to take little bits of ideas from a bunch of different things and try to put them together and make a new thing. So all that goes into the stew of inspiration.

Your first three books aren't in print in the UK yet.

Right yeah. The first two were crime novels that were with Henry Holt, no British publisher. So the Titan books are the only ones in print in the UK.

Any plans to change that in the near future?

I'd love to, believe me, it's not up to me it's more up to a British publisher. I'd love to have the Holt crime novels come out again, I'd love to have the rights back to that too but it's still with Henry Holt. Maybe someday!

Did you feel a big shift changing from writing noir crime to horror?

Well it's funny, when I started writing it was all exclusively horror, and mainly short fiction. When I first tried writing novels, the longer stuff tended to be still dark but more humorous. And I think horror and humour are kind of related, right? Our absurd life, you're either going to react to it with horror or laugh. So it was actually more that I felt like an outsider when I was doing the crime and it felt nice to come home and write these horror novels. And I was really excited for A Head Full Of Ghosts, because it's the first time I'd written a long form horror piece.

You've written a lot of short fiction as well, do you still write them whilst working on the novels?

I do, it's hard to squeeze them in. Actually I find it harder to write short stories now, just for me, after being in novel mode, because they're two different forms. The people who have mastered the short story and it takes a long time and is hard to do, and I found my short fiction has gotten longer now I'm writing novels. I sort of miss the days where I could write a 3,000 word short story. And some of those weren't great cause it was my first stuff that I wrote. But yeah I usually squeeze in one or two a year. Last year I probably had like four just because I had no novel that would stop me. This year i really I have to work out what the next novel is this summer, so this next year of writing is going to be pretty much that novel, whatever it is.

What's next for Paul Tremblay?

So next summer is a short story collection, that will be both with the US publisher and Titan Books, and it's called The Growing Things And Other Stories. As of now I submitted it with 19 stories. We'll see if an editor trims one or not. But two of them are not previously published, just for the collection. One's a novella in the UK, a novelette in the US, based on how you use your word count. So the novella, it's like this fun metafictional thing that has a small connection to A Head Full Of Ghosts, but a much bigger connection to Disappearance At Devil's Rock. And the other original that I wrote, called 'The Thirteenth Tower', will be the last story in the collection. I wouldn't call it the sequel to A Head Full Of Ghosts, but it features Merry, after the book on her life has come out, Merry is at a convention, a big one like San Diego Comicon, and she's confronted by a fan afterwards, that's the frame of the story. And she decides to tell the fan a Marjorie/Merry style story. So that was fun to go back and be with Merry for a few more pages.

So would you ever write a sequel to any of your horror stuff? I know you wrote a sequel to the crime one...

I don't think so, no no. I kind of was forced to write a sequel to the crime one, I really had no design on writing one, they wanted two books and the second one had to feature the same characters. That was really hard for me actually. That was one of the harder things I've written. And I'm very happy with the book, but it was hard for me to find a way into it.

You almost tend to use up your characters...

Yeah that's a good way to put it. Even as a reader I tend not to read a lot of series, maybe I'm a little ADD in that way. I like going from story to story instead of series. Those are more my interest, that's where I tend to go as a reader.
 
Thank you for talking with us Paul Trembly!
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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
Seven-year-old Wen and her parents, Eric and Andrew, are vacationing at a remote cabin on a quiet New Hampshire lake, with their closest neighbours more than two miles in either direction.
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 and friendly. Leonard and Wen talk and play until Leonard abruptly apologises and tells Wen, “None of what’s going to happen is your fault”. Three more strangers 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.”
So 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 intertwined.
The Cabin at the End of the World is a masterpiece of terror and suspense from the fantastically fertile imagination of Paul Tremblay.