A Head Full of Ghosts

by Paul Tremblay

Overview

WINNER OF THE 2015 BRAM STOKER AWARD FOR SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN A NOVEL

A chilling thriller that brilliantly blends psychological suspense and supernatural horror, reminiscent of Stephen King's The Shining, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, and William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist.

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 descent into madness. As their stable 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. With John, Marjorie’s father, out of work for more than a year and the medical bills looming, the family agrees to be filmed, and soon find themselves the unwitting stars of The Possession, a hit reality television show. When events in the Barrett household explode in tragedy, the show and the shocking 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 that took place when she was just eight years old, long-buried secrets and painful memories that clash with what was broadcast on television begin to surface—and a mind-bending tale of psychological horror is unleashed, raising vexing questions about memory and reality, science and religion, and the very nature of evil.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062363237
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	06/02/2015
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the author of The Cabin at the End of the World, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. He is currently a member of the board of directors of the Shirley Jackson Awards, and his essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly online, and numerous year’s-best anthologies. He has a master’s degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his family.

Editorial Reviews

Paul Tremblay's terrific A Head Full of Ghosts generates a…pleasurable fog of calculated, perfectly balanced ambiguity…By the end…you may not be able to say with certainty whether Marjorie's demon exists, but you know in your bones that evil does.

The New York Times Book Review - Terrence Rafferty

★ 04/20/2015
Is the protagonist of this book a demon-possessed victim or a clever, manipulative teen? This savvy tale of horror tantalizingly keeps the reader waiting for an answer. When 14-year-old Marjorie Barrett begins behaving as though she’s demonically possessed, her Massachusetts family starts a reality-based television show, The Possession, to earn the money they desperately need to keep their household together. But is Marjorie really channeling a creature of supernatural evil, or is she just good at Internet research, which keeps her one step ahead of her gullible parents and doctors? Marjorie’s younger sister, Meredith, who is recounting these events 15 years after her family’s ordeal, even wonders whether it’s possible for Marjorie “to be both possessed by a demon and faking it too.” Tremblay paints a believable portrait of a family in extremis emotionally as it attempts to cope with the unthinkable, but at the same time he slyly suggests that in a culture where the wall between reality and acting has eroded, even the make believe might seem credible. Whether psychological or supernatural, this is a work of deviously subtle horror. Agent: Stephen Barbara, Inkwell Management. (June)

Publishers Weekly

By turns horrifying, very funny, melancholy, ironic and, with each page, dazzlingly original, A Head Full of Ghosts is a one-book rocket ride through contemporary society where, if Evil doesn’t actually exist in a Biblical sense, we’re just the folks to invent it on our own.

The Day newspaper

This will easily be remembered as one of the most powerfully disquieting and deeply unsettling novels of the year, and may mark something of a turning point in the mainstream horror genre.

Shock Totem

A Head Full of Ghosts is one of the best novels released this year. ...Paul Tremblay confirms what we already knew: he’s one of the greatest horror writers today.

This is Horror (UK)

Part psychological thriller, part demonic possession horror, this book is a juicy, fast-paced genre bombshell that just happens to be one of the smartest novels you’ll read this year.

The Life Sentence

A Head Full of Ghosts is the literary lovechild of Shirley Jackson and William Peter Blatty, a novel that’s as disturbing as the worst nightmare you ever had as a kid, and as impossible to forget.

Elizabeth Hand

Paul Tremblay is an astonishingly talented writer, but even better, he’s twisted, and fun. A Head Full of Ghosts is mind-bending—scary, sad, sweet, funny, sick. ... . Terrifying, hilarious, smart, and satisfying.

Stewart O'Nan

A Head Full of Ghosts doesn’t end just because you close the book. Some horror, it bleeds through the pages, gets onto your hands, stays with you. You’ll be thinking about this one long after you’ve read it.

Stephen Graham Jones

A genuinely scary, post-modern homage to classic horror that invokes Stanley Kubrik and Shirley Jackson in equal measure, but also manages to innovate on nearly every page. [It] is unlike any horror novel you’ve read, and yet hauntingly, frighteningly familiar.

Sara Gran

Dark, brilliant, and impossible to predict, [this] is more than a perfect horror story. It’s a smart and savage look at American culture in all its madness, and the price girls are forced to pay by a society obsessed with spectacle and sin.

Cara Hoffman

Loved it. Highly recommended for anyone who loves engrossing literary horror-undertones of The House of Leaves (but far more accessible) and The Exorcist, and redolent of Shirley Jackson.

Ellen Datlow

Crackling with dark energy and postmodern wit...[this] superb novel evokes the very best in the tradition—from Shirley Jackson to Mark Z. Danielewski and Marisha Pessl—while also feeling fresh and utterly new. Deeply funny and intensely terrifying, it’s a sensory rollercoaster and not to be missed.

Megan Abbott

[A] creepy, interesting read, great for horror fans.

SFRevu

A mind-bending tale of psychological horror is unleashed, raising disturbing questions about memory and reality, science and religion, and the very nature of evil.

Buzzfeed

[A] scary story, indeed.

BookPage

Gripping and truly scary, this book feels of the moment in a way few thrillers do.

B&N Reads

The novel is stylishly written and well-conceived.

Booklist

…progressively gripping and suspenseful — (Tremblay’s) ultimate, bloodcurdling revelation is as sickeningly satisfying as it is masterful.

NPR Books

Paul Tremblay’s terrific A Head Full of Ghosts generates a haze of an altogether more serious kind: the pleasurable fog of calculated, perfectly balanced ambiguity.

New York Times Book Review

A Head Full of Ghosts scared the living hell out of me, and I’m pretty hard to scare.

Stephen King

06/15/2015
The Barretts are an ordinary family living in a Boston suburb until older daughter Marjorie suddenly displays symptoms of acute schizophrenia. Her increasingly erratic behavior affects her whole family. Her mother drinks and tries to get Marjorie professional help, her father turns to the Catholic Church for aid, and younger sister Merry just wants her sibling to go back to being normal. Is Marjorie sick? Is she faking? Or is she possessed by the devil? Because they are broke, the Barretts take a rather modern solution to the problem by having a film crew chronicle them for a new reality TV show. VERDICT In this brilliantly creepy novel, Tremblay (The Little Sleep) uses the clever framing device of a reporter who wants to write a book about the Barretts by convincing Merry to tell her version of the events. The author also acknowledges the books and movies that influenced his story, most obviously Peter Blatty's The Exorcist but also Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. [See Prepub Alert, 12/15/15.]—MM

Library Journal

01/01/2016
A creepy but not too creepy title. Young Marjorie Barrett is possessed by a demon, and her family decide to allow a TV crew to film them and the possession episodes, with an exorcism to be the series finale. Not surprisingly, this goes very, very badly. The novel's narrator is Marjorie's younger sister, Merry, who tells the story from her current perspective as a 23-year-old adult and from her point of view at eight years old, as the events at the Barrett house transpired. And then there's Karen, a blogger rewatching the TV series while live blogging about the episodes. What actually happened in the Barrett household and whether or not Marjorie was possessed are discussed by all three narrators—readers will have to decide if any of them is reliable. One of the more interesting moments in the work occurs in Merry's apartment when she meets with a reporter to discuss the possession and the reporter sees shelves of classic possession books and DVDs, except for one glaring omission (the missing title, Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, should give readers a heads-up about what's really going on). The horror here is less graphic than in The Exorcist or The Omen and will appeal to readers who aren't sure how deeply into the genre they want to go. Merry's bookshelves will provide a great bibliography for next reads. VERDICT The questions surrounding what possession is (and is not) as well as how television crews can manipulate reality will intrigue readers.—Laura Pearle, Milton Academy, MA

School Library Journal

2015-04-16
When a teenager exhibits early signs of schizophrenia, her parents turn not to traditional psychiatry but to a Catholic priest determined to drive out demons and a sleazy reality TV show eager to get the whole fiasco on tape. Fifteen years ago, the Barretts were just a typical Massachusetts family: father John, mother Sarah, and two daughters, Marjorie, 14, and Merry, 8, who got along well and often wrote stories together. Though John had lost his job, the family managed to stay afloat. Then Marjorie's behavior changed from normal teenage angst to something more disturbing. Tremblay (No Sleep till Wonderland, 2010, etc.) intercuts the past with present-day scenes of Merry being interviewed by an author writing a book about the Barretts' decision to allow their life to be televised on The Possession. It was John, with his renewed faith in God, who pushed for a Catholic intervention—an exorcism, à la Linda Blair—and Sarah finally agreed. Their priest, Father Wanderly, had connections to the television series, and going on the show offered a way for the Barretts to avoid defaulting on their mortgage. The TV crew moved into the family home, and yet, instead of capturing the "truth," an even more elaborate fiction began to play out, with deadly consequences. As the adult Merry's memories clash with the televised version of events leading up to the climactic final episode of The Possession—it's not spoiling too much to say that everything that could go wrong does—readers will begin to question if anyone in the house is truly sane. Tremblay expertly ratchets up the suspense until the tension is almost at its breaking point.

Kirkus Reviews

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