In the final week of our Countdown to Hallowe’en this year, Mark reviews an award-winning book that is just being published in the UK.
The name Paul Tremblay is one I’ve heard around before. I think it was Tim Lebbon who mentioned him to me in an interview years ago as ‘a name to watch’. And yet this is his first novel I’ve read.
It’s a memorable read.
The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia.
To her parents despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie s bizarre outbursts and subsequent descent into madness. As their home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help. Father Wanderly suggests an exorcism; he believes the vulnerable teenager is the victim of demonic possession. He also contacts a production company that is eager to document the Barretts’ plight for a reality television show. With John, Marjorie s father, out of work for more than a year and medical bills looming, the family reluctantly agrees to be filmed, never imagining that reality television show The Possession would become an instant hit. When events in the Barrett household explode in tragedy, the show and the incidents it captures become the stuff of urban legend.
Fifteen years later, a bestselling writer interviews Marjorie s younger sister, Merry. As she recalls those long-ago events from her childhood when she was just eight years old, painful memories and long-buried secrets that clash with the television broadcast and the Internet blogs begin to surface.
A Head Full of Ghosts is a clever, slippery novel – one which knows its audience and knows what it’s trying to do – and does it admirably.
Reading the summary above, regular readers of the Horror genre will recognise much of what is here – allegedly haunted houses, strange things going on, religious clergy, young girls, demonic possession. Nothing particularly new, right?
Don’t let this put you off though. Paul knows all of this, and even puts the tropes up front, with a nod and a wink, in a kind of “Everyone knows about The Exorcist, right?” kind of way. What the book does so well is deliberately take these well-known aspects and give them a contemporary twist. It reminded me of my recently read The Last Days of Jack Sparks novel by Jason Arnopp, which did a similar thing (review HERE).
The book takes place in two times – one when the events at the Barratt household took place, the other now, fifteen years later. The earlier events are told through the eyes of Meredith/Merry, who, remembering her life as an eight-year old, conveys a manner that allows plot progression whilst still maintaining the innocence of a young girl. Her older, fourteen-year old sister is more knowing and yet still recognisably naïve, as we should expect.
Merry tells us what happens when her older sister Marjorie appears to be possessed. As things continue, the media discovers what is happening and the family are paid to have a documentary series made about what is going on. Through the plot, though mainly in recall fifteen years later, Merry describes the effects on her, her sister and the family.
What makes this work most is that the family generally are understandable and identifiable. John and Sarah, as Mom and Dad, show the tension created by one parent holding down a job and the other having recently been made redundant, albeit through the eyes of an eight-year-old. As in The Exorcist, a parent (John) turns to religion for support but here it is complicated in that by doing so he alienates himself from his wife, who is an agnostic. Despite both characters being young, the two daughters’ voices are noticeably un-alike, reflecting their differences in age and their personal characteristics.
The struggle in the middle class Barrett’s daily lives is cleverly recognised as a possible reason for tension in the family home and therefore a potential cause of the strange goings-on. This strain creates the type of unhappy home where the actions of their pubescent daughter could be seen as attention-seeking or actually where things out to cause ill can reside.
When the events in the house are filmed for television, it is unclear whether the events are genuine or in part manufactured by Marjorie for the media. This is a tale which happens in the full glare of television’s spotlights and media attention, and the author does well to use these situations to create that atmosphere of ‘could-be’ that keeps the reader guessing up to the end.
This is not the only story here, though. Paul also cleverly frames these earlier events with a present day background story of a blog and a book being written by Merry about the phenomenon fifteen years previous. By doing so these older events are able to be examined, analysed and processed with a degree of distance and perspective.
Though there are ‘peek-a-boo’ moments, they are not as often as you might expect.
Generally this is a subtler work with a depth that is only revealed after you’ve finished it. That’s not to say that there are no scenes that shock, and when they happen they are done well, but the shock may be in part also due to the fact that they stand out from the rest of what is going on. It’s clearly not going to end well, an admission pointed out from the start, although it may not be quite the ending you expect.
Having laid hints throughout, the finish of the book is such a clever response that I had to read the twist twice. There is the reason why the book won the 2015 Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel. I am sure re-reading the book will bring a different perspective to the reader.
When the book is finished, there’s some lovely extras given by Paul in the Titan edition: a set of group discussion questions, an essay on the politics of Horror, a recommendation list and a set of extended liner notes explaining where key ideas are from and which character is named after whom. They are great to use – I’m already looking at books and films I’ve not seen/read already.
I said at the beginning that A Head Full of Ghosts was the first novel by Paul I have read. Based on this, it won’t be the last. Once started, I found it difficult to put down. Chilling (even for me, a hardened reader and reviewer!), clever and in my opinion about as good a story of this sort as you are going to get.
Recommended for Hallowe’en, or indeed any time you want a good scary read.
A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay
376 pages
ISBN: 978 1785653674
Published by Titan Books (UK), September 2016.
Randy’s review of the same book is HERE. Paul himself will be answering questions as part of our Countdown tomorrow!
