The Cabin at the End of the World

I liked the ending, actually found its ambiguity compelling, but the moments leading up to it felt like a slog. I'll write a fuller review later in an attempt to capture what did and didn't work for me.

[That promised update]

The basic premise of a small family in an isolated family coming under threat by a group of four strangers guided by questionable religious revelations is initially intriguing but doesn't really work in execution.

As far as good points, Tremblay's writing is solid, if a little wordy, on a sentence level. And the characters of the family (made of two gay fathers and their adopted daughter) are drawn to be likeable. I can see how their plight will emotionally engage a reader.

The religious quartet invade the cabin and tell the family that God demands they choose and kill one of their own (either of the fathers or the daughter). Should they fail, he will destroy the world.

As much as the premise may be suspenseful, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. This isn't God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son or demanding Lot find 10 righteous men or even sending himself/his son/his messiah to be crucified. Despite the horrific nature of those, they resonate with a certain logic.

What is this sacrifice of a family member supposed to prove and to whom? Is God testing the quartet? Is he testing the family? What does any of this have to do with the fate of all mankind? It's hard not to feel that God is just a novelist who's cooked up a source of tension because tension is what drives novels.

You could try cutting God out of the equation. What if the quartet is forcing this sacrifice for their own ends? There's a suggestion one of the four is a homophobe, but his motivations are quickly rendered irrelevant. We're given no indication that the other three are driven by animus or sadism or self-interest. The quartet is doing this because God told them to and God told them to because...? (See previous paragraph.)

This arbitrariness would have been forgivable in a shorter or more surreal novel, one that leaned into the parabolic nature of the story. Instead, the narrative halts frequently to give us flashbacks or recount the plots of a couple episodes of Steven Universe. This realism only serves to highlight how awkwardly constructed the central premise is.