A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay
A tale of two sisters
Sisters Merry and Marjorie have always been close, despite their age difference. One of their favorite secret pastimes is crafting short stories based on illustrations in old Richard Scarry books; like imagining a tale based around the drawing of a cat whose car got stuck in molasses.
But when Marjorie’s stories get downright creepy — and she insists that they are true — young Merry begins to feel that something might be wrong with her sister.
Indeed, something is very wrong. Soon enough Marjorie is acting out, speaking in tongues, and literally climbing the wall. Naturally, their born-again Christian father becomes convinced that his eldest daughter is possessed by a demon. The situation only goes from bad to worse when a reality TV crew descends on their home to film a show about the family, culminating in a staged-for-TV exorcism…
If this all sounds like a generic demonic possession narrative, well, you’d be right. On the surface at least. And if the mention of reality TV puts you off, well, try not to let it — I promise it’s handled far better than you might expect.
But yes, for much of this book, the possession/exorcism story treads fairly familiar ground, leaning into the tropes that fill your expectations' bingo card, although it is told in a very different way than you might be used to.
The vast majority of the book is told from eight-year-old Merry’s perspective, so we get lots of details about her relationship with her sister, their parents, and other things that seem reasonable for an eight-year-old to fixate on. While she seemingly understands and captures much of what is going on concerning Marjorie’s “illness,” there is much which is absent from the telling, simply because child Merry isn’t aware.
Two additional perspectives help bridge these gaps: one is adult Merry (now going by her full name, Meredith) recounting her memories to a non-fiction author writing a book about the family, the other a horror blogger dissecting the reality show the family starred in (and as a delightful reader surrogate, gleefully poking holes in what just transpired).
But as I alluded to earlier, this might all sound fairly stock-possession story, but there are actually a number of effective twists and turns that’ll keep you guessing what’s really going on right up until the inevitably tragic conclusion.
As a horror book, I will say, the scary moments are few are far between, but when they come, they are genuinely creepy.
Trembly does a great job of capturing the different voices of these characters, bringing color and depth to the varying perspectives with an attention to detail which makes these people and this world they inhabit feel real and true.
It’s because of this that even in the lengthy sections where you’ve been starved of outright horror for a while, the book maintains a high degree of entertainment. It’s an immensely readable novel that does a great job of getting under your skin, so that you want to keep reading to find out what will happen next — and what is actually going on.