Two gay dads and their adopter daughter receive a few creepy guests at their holiday cabin in the woods. Apparently they were the forbearers of the Apocalypse, the 4 common horsemen, asking them to make a sacrifice in order to avoid the destruction of the world.

My friends Sabrina, Adriane, and Redmond. The four of us are here because we’re trying to help save—save a
whole bunch of people. But we need your help to do that. Help isn’t even the right word. We can’t do anything to help anyone without you. Please believe me. Would you mind letting us in? We just want to talk, tell you more, explain, and speaking through the door is making a difficult conversation near impossible—”

I know, and I am sorry to intrude on your vacation. Such a beautiful spot, too. Never been to this lake before.
Believe me, up until a few days ago, the four of us, we never thought we’d be here at this lake. The four of us never thought we’d be here to talk to you nice people. But we do need to talk with you, Eric, and with Andrew, and Wen, too. It’s vital that we talk. I cannot stress that enough. I know you have no reason to, but you must trust me. I’m pretty sure Wen trusts me. I get the sense she’s a very good judge of character.

As I started reading I realized that the plot was very familiar – so familiar that I could tell what was going to happen next – and that’s because I saw the movie. “Knock at the cabin” came out last year and it had Dave Bautista playing Leonard.

They absolutely nailed the casting of the 4 intruders and the gay couple.

You have to understand; we cannot and will not choose who is sacrificed for you and as importantly, we cannot act for you, either. It doesn’t—it won’t work that way. You must choose who is to be sacrificed and you must physically perform the act. Like I said, we are here to make sure the message is heard and understood.

I loved the closeness of the family, the love between daddy Eric and daddy Andrew and also loved Wen’s adoption story. Adopted by a gay couple, she’s thriving.

They had a set of five pictures of her lying on her back on a white blanket, awake and her balled-up fists hovering next to her unrecognizable face. Wen was unexpectedly shaken by the photos and convinced she was, for the first time, looking at her real self and this real her was gone, forgotten, banished, or worse, that imperfect unwanted child was hidden, locked away inside of her somewhere.

Wen wants to stop going to the Chinese school. The work is difficult. She isn’t picking up on the spoken words and written characters as quickly as the other students, almost all of whom have parents who are Chinese. She does not practice speaking nor does she do all her homework during the week. Wen can’t articulate the following but she harbors an inchoate anger at her biological parents for giving her up, and she’s angry at the country China itself that it is a place in which her parents would be allowed/forced to give her up. She also spends much of her class time daydreaming about all the fun Saturday things her regular-school friends get to do without her.

    We stare, and we watch the rain and we watch our faces, and we don’t say anything, and we say everything.

Tremblay has written detective novels, scores of short stories and a few horror books, all while keeping his day job, schoolteacher. Perhaps because of having to deal with adolescents at work and at home, he is fond of horror story tropes. In A Head Full of Ghosts he became one with the demonic possession tale. For a later work, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, he considered what sort of things would most terrify him personally. And the winner was missing child, every parent’s nightmare. This time he took on another favorite source of terror. ‘How would I do a home invasion novel I’d like to read?’ I guarantee you have not read one like this one before.

There are plenty of elements in common with the usual home invasion horrors. Wondering if your invaders are nuts,
fearing for your life and the lives of your loved ones, trying to figure out ways to get the better of the baddies. What is different is that the home invaders do not seem to be evil people, despite the most definitely evil-looking scythe-like weaponry they tote. Leonard, the leader, seems particularly reasonable, a gentle giant, nice even. They might be insane, but what if they are not? There are reasons offered to consider the latter possibility. The other three are definitely equipped with good sides too, but a bit less manifestly than their leader.