It opens with almost-8-year-old Wen contentedly collecting grasshoppers in the front yard of her family’s vacation home. I just re-read the first chapter of Cabin, and on the surface, it’s almost innocuous. In books filled with “gotta,” beginnings are crucial. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I think books with this kind of gotta have three very important things: killer opening pages, high stakes, and a satisfying payoff. I read it in two days, feeling feverish and anxious and like I just had to know, even if knowing was terrible. Today, I’m looking at The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay. Maybe we can steal a few tricks for our own work. Okay, sure, but how do we do that? In this series, I’ll look at some books that I personally could not put down and try to pinpoint why. If a book doesn’t get them by page one, who’s to say they’ll come back? It’s my personal belief that one of our jobs as horror writers is to write in such a way that our readers just gotta know what happens next. People have so many options for how to spend their time, which they have increasingly less of. Books compete with so many other things for attention: responsibilities, family, work, social media, smartphones, television, movies. It is also my personal feeling that-especially for new authors-these are the kinds of stories that have the best chance of success. My favorite stories are the ones that have some serious gotta right from the get-go. Oh boy it was bad and oh boy it was good and oh boy in the end it didn’t matter how rude it was or how crude it was because in the end it was just like the Jacksons said on that record-don’t stop till you get enough.” Nasty as a handjob in sleazy bar, fine as a fuck from the world’s most talented call-girl. I gotta know if she finds out her best friend is screwing her husband. I gotta know will he catch the shitheel who killed his father. In his novel Misery, Stephen King calls this T he Gotta: “ I gotta know will she live. I move my son a little more quickly through his bedtime routine so I can curl up in my own bed and read, often until way too late, my blood pumping faster because I need to know what happens next. I read through breakfast, lunch, dinner, in line at the grocery store. I wake up thinking about the book, pluck it off my nightstand to read for those precious few minutes before my son gets up.
While I am a pretty patient reader, one of my favorite experiences is when a book latches onto me from the very beginning and then does not let go. PSA: This column includes spoilers for The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay.
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