Book Review: 'A Head Full of Ghosts' by Paul Tremblay
I pulled three books off my shelves after finishing A Head Full of Ghosts: William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (of course), and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. That’s just one of the many great things about Paul Tremblay’s new novel – it wears its inspirations proudly, and that enthusiastic embrace of influence gets you thinking about the old classics in new and exciting ways. So the paperbacks get pulled off the shelves, the DVD copy of The Exorcist gets the dust blown off, and every title on Netflix that has the word ‘possession’ in the title gets a once over, as you start to reconsider, well, everything you thought you knew about what has become a true sub-genre for horror fans.
The bare bones story of A Head Full of Ghosts is easy to grasp; Merry Barrett is working with a bestselling author on the story of what happened to her family fifteen years previously, when Merry’s older sister, Marjorie, began to exhibit bizarre behavior, like climbing the walls of her bedroom and projectile vomiting at the kitchen table. The recently unemployed father is our true believer, a lapsed Catholic who blames demonic possession, while the mother is the secular skeptic, only acquiescing to the help of the church once medical science has proved a dead end and Marjorie’s symptoms become dangerous. In the middle of the family crisis is Merry, stuck between belief, skepticism, and the intense love she feels for her older sister.
The fractures Marjorie’s illness open in the family threaten to engulf them once they agree to allow a television crew to film their ordeal, culminating in a classic, catholic style exorcism in Marjorie’s bedroom. The show only lasts six episodes due to the violent climax of that exorcism and the tragedy that follows, and since then Merry has spent her life trying to come to terms with the aftermath of that painful event.
A compelling premise on its own, Tremblay takes it a step further, keeping the reader on their toes by disrupting the narrative and hopscotching through time as Merry tries to untangle what is real, what is false memory, and what might just be the depiction of her family through the distorted lens of reality television. The intimacy we feel with Merry heightens this effect. It’s a story told as a whisper in the ear from a new found friend we want desperately to like, but don’t entirely trust. Merry is a delicate character; the events of her past have broken her and she has yet to put everything back together again, and we know there are secrets yet to be revealed.
But the thing that really elevates of A Head Full of Ghosts from the typical tale of demonic possession is the way the novel is able to not just absorb its influences, but put them front and center, make them part of the story, so it becomes not just the tale of a girl who may or may not be possessed by a demon, but about every possession story that came before it.
Like the movie Scream, by stating the rules of the game at the outset and then dissecting them through a series of brilliant blog posts, Tremblay is able to create something with greater depth and complexity, a new angle to understanding a sub-genre that by now has as many tired clichés as the narrative of the werewolf, the vampire, or the zombie apocalypse. Simply stated, A Head Full of Ghosts brings the possession narrative fully into the 21st century.
Is Marjorie possessed by a demon, or is she suffering from a mental illness? What does this say about the nature of evil? Even worse, is she lying about the whole thing? We don’t get to the answers through any of the traditional avenues, instead we are left guessing – right up to the last page. And if the book did only that it would probably be enough, but the fact that Tremblay is able to tie all of these strings together, while sprinkling in a generous portion of pop culture references that any horror fan can appreciate,and maintaining a pace that never lets up as Marjorie’s transgressions become more terrifying, and still dealing with the shifting nature of personal narrative? An astounding accomplishment.
A Head Full of Ghosts seems to be destined to become a classic, not just in the sub-genre of possession stories, but in the overall canon of horror literature.