Horror

I won this novella in a Goodreads drawing and wow…what a strange, disturbing little book it was.

This is a dystopian/apocalyptic novel that follows a woman — I don’t think we ever even learn her name — whose daily bus commute takes an abrupt detour one day, ending up in the town of “Not in Service,” population 66.

She and her fellow passengers are forced off the bus via gunpoint, and she learns pretty quickly that the town is brutal, gruesome and horrifying. The townsfolk, who were all at one time passengers like herself, are dressed in rags, appear sickly, live in tattered tents or huts and in order to survive, they eat bugs, rats…and each other.

They’ve developed a strange sort of surreal society divided into two main factions: the Chicago Faction and the Pittsburg Faction, and if you want to survive, you need to join one of them. The people in the town, who for the most part have been stripped of any human dignity (though they convince themselves otherwise), have created a crazy religion around the idea that someday a bus will arrive with the destination of Chicago or Pittsburg — somewhere other than Out of Service.

So from the moment our main character arrives, we follow her as she desperately searches for a way out of the hellhole, refusing to believe that there is no way to escape, as the other townspeople have claimed. Fearless and hopeful, she makes one failed attempt after another to escape which renders the story all the more horrifying. So in this way, the book was sort of a survival story. What’s interesting is that our main character ends up being kind of an anti-hero as she’s harboring some pretty serious secrets of her own.

This truly messed up world was also fascinating in a morbid kind of way — it was gross, disturbing and super cringe-worthy. Yet, this story with its twisted plot was also a page-turner as we want to see if our heroine would finally manage to escape the nightmare in which she’d been unwillingly placed. It’s like the morbid fascination one has with a car accident: I can’t bear to look yet I can’t look away.

It’s also interesting that no matter how dark and twisted the story was, there was a good peppering of humor thrown in. Dark humor, mind you but humor nonetheless, and I actually did catch myself laughing out loud several times. But still, you’ll want to keep in mind that the book was filled with grotesque scenes of violence and cannibalism and is definitely not for the faint of heart.

All in all, Edge of the Known Bus Line is a great read! I found this a dark, compelling and mesmerizing story with rich, multi-faceted characters with an enthralling storyline. The world-building is phenomenal, and the delightfully twisted and chilling plot sucked me right in so much so that I read the entire novella in one go. This unsettling story certainly provides a lot of think about well after the last page has been turned.

I don’t think I’m going to be taking a bus anytime soon.

In the spirit of disclosure, I won this book in a giveaway and was under no obligation to write a review.

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Cabin at the End of the World is a horror novel that follows Seven-year-old Wen and her parents, Eric and Andrew who are vacationing at a remote cabin on a quiet New Hampshire lake.

One afternoon, as Wen catches grasshoppers in the front yard, a large stranger named Leonard unexpectedly appears in the driveway. He is young, friendly, and he wins Wen over almost instantly. They talk and play for a while until Leonard abruptly apologizes and tells Wen, “None of what’s going to happen is your fault.”

Then, three more strangers then arrive at the cabin carrying menacing homemade weapons. As Wen runs 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.”

The four strangers plead with Wen, Andrew, and Eric to let them in, that they have to, that the fate of the entire world is at stake, but they refuse. Eventually, the four strangers manage to forcibly break in, and there are injuries as a result. The story then turns into a tense and gripping home invasion tale of survival, which is personally a trope that scares the bejeezus out of me.

Once the four of them have subdued Wed and her dad, they explain that the Wen, Andrew, and Eric need to make a sacrifice – an ultimate sacrifice within the next 24 hours or so. If not, the world will be destroyed. So the question is: Are the four strangers cultists or crazies? Or is the world on the brink of the apocalypse?

The book did an excellent job at building up suspense and paranoia as the remote little cabin turned into a house of horrors complete with a torture chamber. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time, to see what was going to happen next and whether that which the four had predicted would come to pass — that is, whether the world actually was on the brink of collapse.

Now I will say that some of the violence that takes place is described in very gory, vivid and disturbing ways so more sensitive readers might want to pass on this one. I do like a good horror novel, so it didn’t bother me too much — though it definitely was disturbing.

This was an uncomfortable book – a real psychological thriller — whose tension escalated as time passed in the cabin. It was tense, suspenseful and gut-wrenchingly horrifying, the kind of book that will either give you nightmares or keep you up at night.

Though it was a suspenseful and gripping read with well-developed characters, at the end of it all, it didn’t quite work for me.

The main reason was the ending: Let me just say that if you like a nice, tidy resolution to a story, then this book is not for you. This is the kind of story that leaves you with more questions than answers, and leaves you with an unsatisfied feeling after turning the last page — or at least it did for me.

It seemed like the author spent the entire novel building up this incredible amount of suspense only to have it fizzle out at the story’s end. I expected more of a dramatic ending — or at the very least, an answer to the story’s central questions.

But the payoff just wasn’t there. Now if you don’t mind somewhat vague endings or experimental stories, then, by all means, give Cabin at the End of the World a try. It just wasn’t the novel for me. ⭐⭐

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