The Intruder

“I’ll be happy when the tree is gone. I’ve been worried about it for the last month, and now that a storm is coming, I’m really worried. I look up at the roof of my house. It will probably hold. And the tree probably won’t fall down. I probably won’t die tonight. And if I do, the good news is that nobody will miss me.”

Casey’s forested environs incite narrative tension at the novel’s start. The Intruder is set in an isolated locale, a trope of the psychological thriller genre. The “cabin in the woods” trope affects an ominous mood. The references to the unstable tree, the impending storm, and the tenuous roof add to this unsettled atmosphere and foreshadow danger. Additionally, Casey’s emotional isolation is flatly conveyed here through her assumption that nobody would care if she died.

“Nothing. I stay by the window, searching the trees in the distance. The woods look so foreboding at night—I don’t wander out there after dark, even though it’s most likely safe. After all, aside from a single neighbor about five minutes away, I’m the only one who lives out here. It’s far off the beaten path. So who was staring into my window?”

The face that appears in Casey’s cabin window ignites her fear and anxiety, adding to the narrative’s suspenseful mood. Casey’s description of her circumstances intensifies the underlying sense of foreboding. Details including the trees, woods, darkness, and her remote neighbor capture the intensity of Casey’s solitude. If something were to happen, Casey has no one to rely on and nowhere to go.

“But then I started to think about it. Why did a normal-looking guy in his thirties suddenly decide to move to a cabin in the middle of nowhere? When I asked him about it, he brushed me off, mumbling something about wanting to get closer to nature. It was a blatant lie—I could see it all over his face.”

Casey’s musings on her neighbor Lee Traynor introduce the novel’s theme of The Relationship Between Fear and Trust. On the surface, Lee seems harmless because he looks “normal.” However, Casey has a habit of distrusting others.