Horror novelist Paul Tremblay is venturing down a road that’s going nowhere fast.
About a mile in, we lose cell service.
It’s not coming back.
Credit: Michael Lajoie; William Morrow
The slopes of San Francisquito Canyon grow steeper.
Swaying golden brush becomes thatches of thick, olive chaparral.
The little boxes of houses recede on the horizon.
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Instead, it collapsed two years after completion.
No one who witnessed the failure survived to describe exactly what happened.
It remains California’s second deadliest single disaster after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.
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The characters (and the reader) are never sure if what they’re experiencing is real.
“The very essence of our existence is ambiguous.
We don’t know the answers to the biggest questions of life.”
Anthony Breznican
The book is a home-invasion story.
These unwelcome visitors claim to have shared a series of visions the world is about to end.
And they are determined to make the family believe their nightmarish scenario.
Anthony Breznican
Are the images on the news actually harbingers of Armageddon?
The strangers are strangers to each other, too.
“I tried to twist or mess around with some of the conventions or expectations,” Tremblay says.
Anthony Breznican
“Obviously, I wanted the readers to empathize with the family.
But I also thought some of the invaders thought that their experience was a horror too.
They really felt like they had no choice in what they were doing.
And to me that’s a scary thing.”
She ends up on an offshoot of San Francisquito Canyon road.
There’s a hush here.
A deepening silence as the hills close around us.
Ahead of us, the canyon widens and we see the first remnant of the St. Francis Dam.
It’s the size of a house.
It’s immovable, except for that 150-foot wall of water that shattered it and drove it downstream.
There are other monuments to the disaster lying beside the road, which is scrawled with bizarre graffiti.
It’s veryThe Walking Dead.
Or even just being there then, an earthquake striking."
The only part of the dam left standing after the collapse was a narrow band from the middle.
Now it rests in the dusty creek, a plate full of rubble, pocked with overgrowth.
you could still see the ridges, like teeth in a gigantic, decaying jaw bone.
“I wanted her to be where therewasan apocalypse of sorts, right?”
“I mean, apocalypses come in sizes big and small.
I’ll never forget sort of the feeling of walking through there.
It’s a weird feeling.
Even though it’s the most horrific thing that could possibly happen.”
We leave as the sun sets, as mosquitos come out to feed.
The ruins of the fallen dam vanish again.
This time, they are swallowed by a wave of darkness.
