A Head Full Of Ghosts walks the fine line between the supernatural and the psychological, exploring the very nature of evil through one young girl, perhaps schizophrenic, perhaps possessed. It’s scary, it’s poignant and it is sharp. Exactly what you’d expect from Paul Tremblay.
Winner of the 2015 Bram Stoker Award, a brilliant novel of psychological horror—and demonic possession?—from the nationally bestselling author of The Cabin at the End of the World, Survivor Song, and The Pallbearers Club.
“A Head Full of Ghosts scared the living hell out of me, and I’m pretty hard to scare.” — Stephen King
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, 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.
Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the nationally bestselling author of Horror Movie, The Beast You Are, The Pallbearers Club, Survivor Song, Growing Things and Other Stories, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted into the Universal Pictures film Knock at the Cabin. Another is his first children’s book. He has been teaching high school math for a long, long, time, and he lives outside Boston with his family.
“For us, horror stories are a long, dark, scary tunnel. You hear sounds you don’t want to hear; you see things that are going to stick in your head. But if you keep putting one foot after the other, that speck of light at the end is going to grow a little bit bigger and […]
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Tremblay’s novel A Head Full of Ghosts “scared the living hell out of me, and I’m pretty hard to scare,” King said. That goes a long way toward explaining why Tremblay has been anointed one of the new masters of horror, and why his work has picked up Bram Stoker and British Fantasy awards, among […]
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We decided to do something a bit different this month—instead of just one Mind Meld at the end of the month, we’re doing four, covering four times as many of our favorite scary reads. We’ve asked our bookish friends near and far about their current favorite horror favorites, and are breaking them out by the […]
