A Head Full of Ghosts
by Paul Tremblay
Summary
The Barrett family of Beverly, Massachusetts came apart on television. Fourteen year old Marjorie began to change, voices, threats, blasphemies, things no psychiatrist could arrest, and her unemployed father, returning to the Church, invited in both an exorcist and a production company: The Possession aired as reality TV before its finale, and a month after the show ended the family was dead. Fifteen years later a writer sits down with the only survivor, Merry, who was eight when it happened, and the novel is Merry's telling, braided with the blog posts of a horror critic deconstructing the show episode by episode.
Tremblay's design is a hall of mirrors with a child at the center. Every scene arrives multiply filtered, Merry's memories admittedly contaminated by the show, the blogger cataloguing the exorcism movie tropes the production amplified, and the question the book never answers is the one it is built on: was Marjorie possessed, schizophrenic, or performing, and in what combination, and for whose benefit? The sisters' scenes together, Marjorie telling Merry stories that curdle midway, are the book's best horror, sibling love with something moving under it. And the poisoned family dinner and the question of whose hand arrives with a last rotation that makes the reader reread everything, including Merry.
The blogger chapters double as a working essay on the exorcism genre, The Exorcist deconstructed inside a novel that is also reconstructing it.
Around two hundred and eighty pages, fast and destabilizing.
Best for readers who want possession horror with the certainty removed, and the modern classic of the ambiguity school.
Historical Context & Significance
A Head Full of Ghosts won the Bram Stoker Award for 2015, and Stephen King's tweet, that it scared the living hell out of him, became the cover line and the coronation: Paul Tremblay, a Massachusetts math teacher with cult novels behind him, moved with this book to the front of literary horror's new generation.
Its method made a school. The deliberate, sustained ambiguity, supernatural and psychiatric explanations held in permanent superposition, with media critique built into the structure, became the decade's signature mode, and Tremblay its most visible practitioner through The Cabin at the End of the World and the books after; the novel is now a fixture of courses on unreliable narration.
The possession genre itself was the other beneficiary, Tremblay having written it partly because the trope had gone dormant; the wave of ambiguous exorcism fiction and film that followed traces here. A long gestating film adaptation has circled ever since, the book's structure famously resistant to the camera it satirizes.