A Head Full of Ghosts

This is 3.5 stars I’m going to round up to 4. Overall I was pretty well entertained!

I enjoyed Marjorie and Merry’s dynamic, and I found Merry to be a convincing child perspective. I liked the religious angle of the story, and the way the parents’ relationship fell apart.

I also enjoyed the ambiguous ending - I think you could come up with lots of theories about this book, and I’ll be looking at other reviews to see what folks think.

But I gave it 3.5 stars for a reason! I didn’t enjoy the blog entries and all the analysis that brought up horror movies and books and such. I was bored by it, and I was not familiar with a lot of the references. I don’t enjoy pop culture references in books because of that.

I also don’t enjoy reading from a kid’s perspective, so I didn’t love the fact that I was reading from Merry. Getting the book from Marjorie’s perspective might’ve been too difficult given how Tremblay wants to keep the truth vague. I’d have taken either parents’s perspective to be honest - both of them have downward spirals I’d have found compelling. Having said that, Merry’s perspective felt like a child’s without being condescending or overly precious.

I was definitely engaged and I felt for the sisters a lot. The way their relationship is presented, it’s very messy, such that it would be difficult to figure out how to feel about Marjorie. That was the best part of the story for me.

4 stars with an extra half star and rounded up because I struggle so much with this genre (possession and exorcism) for a lot of the reasons that are specifically addressed in this book. It takes the tropes I hate and acknowledges them, uses them, without falling into the usual cop-out of just hanging a lampshade on them. And even more bonus points for maintaining some of the twists and red herrings that the thriller genre is known for without annoying me the way it usually does. I don’t think it’s the best possible exploration of why these stories hold such a fascination in our culture, but it comes closer than anything else has. I can’t decide if I want to take away or add half a star for the obvious call out to his own short story. It’s a good story… and it actually works here… so I guess we’ll say those two impulses cancel each other out. Anyway I’ll be recommending it to people who do like exorcism stories if only to give some idea of what I would like them to be.

When psychiatric treatment fails to cure a 14-year-old girl’s bizarre outbursts, her desperate father turns to religion. And with the family’s finances in dire straits, he allows a film crew into their home to film a reality TV show about the apparent demonic possession and ensuing exorcism.

This book is told through the eyes of Merry, the 8-year-old sister of the troubled teenager. Tremblay’s handling of such a young viewpoint character is truly masterful. As the father of an 8-year-old girl, Merry felt authentically kid-like, not like the weirdly precocious miniature adults so often seen in entertainment. She’s stuck in a terrifying situation that she’s even less equipped to handle than her struggling parents, betrayed and frightened of the older sister she used to idolize.

Unfortunately, despite a great viewpoint character, the story isn’t quite as fulfilling as it could have been. The possession and climactic exorcism are handled in a pretty traditional manner that’s been seen in fiction a dozen times. The reality show trappings and passages of the book featuring a horror blogger providing wry retrospective commentary upon the TV episodes add some originality to the proceedings, but in the end it felt more could have been done with those elements.

I enjoyed this book and raced through it pretty quickly, but despite moments of excellence it felt like there was some wasted potential.