Is it the mysterious writer? The lawyer with a dark past? The reporter suffering from PTSD? The guests pick over the clues as another freezing night draws in, unable to know who to trust and who to fear. Lapena swiftly takes away all trappings of modernity by enveloping the hotel in an ice storm – no reception, no phone lines, no electricity, no internet – so that, when a body, is discovered their first morning, the group find themselves in the middle of a classic mystery. In Shari Lapena’s An Unwanted Guest (Bantam), a disparate group of guests make their way to a remote hotel in the Catskill mountains. Just like his excellent novel about the possession – or not – of a teenage girl, A Head Full of Ghosts, Tremblay skilfully keeps his readers guessing about the reality of Leonard’s ominous warning as he lets his horrifying scenario play out. When they refuse, Leonard shows them footage of an approaching tsunami. The group force their way into the cabin, tell them the apocalypse is nigh, and can only be avoided if the family sacrifice one of their members. When his “friends” arrive, bearing makeshift weapons, she runs to find her parents, Daddy Eric and Daddy Andrew, and her little family are catapulted into a nightmare. She knows she shouldn’t speak to the friendly stranger who arrives – an unusually large man called Leonard – but she chats to him for a while, until, even to her young mind, things start to feel a little wrong.
Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World (Titan) opens as seven-year-old Wen is collecting grasshoppers outside her family’s remote New Hampshire cabin. How far will the ambition of both women drive them?Ī remote New Hampshire cabin is the setting for Paul Tremblay’s ‘horrifying’ The Cabin at the End of the World. But then Diane arrives as the latest member of Severin’s team, cool, beautiful and mysterious, an adult version of “the 17-year-old girl standing in that far corner of my head, the one glaring at me, needy, full of thunder and consequence”.
Kit, who has devoted herself to work since school – how else could she get a doctorate by the age of 30? – is desperate to land one of them. Much-needed funding has arrived for this under-researched condition, but there are only a couple of places on the programme. “Don’t we all feel we have something banked down deep inside just waiting for its moment, the slow gathering of hot blood?” Like PMT on steroids, it affects, 3-8% of women, resulting in terrible mood swings and uncontrollable rage.
Prestigious science scholarships duly follow, and the two haven’t seen each other for years when we meet Kit again as an adult – a researcher in the lab of the dazzlingly talented Dr Severin, who is looking into premenstrual dysphoric disorder.
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