A Head Full of Ghosts

This is a very clever book, one that I'll remember for structure and style, rather than one of those that got under my skin and made an emotional impact.

Tremblay knows his stuff, he alludes to classic horror novels in a winking way to build up the story for A Head Full of Ghosts.

The blog posts were a nice meta touch, well integrated, and showing a breakdown and criticism of the very story we are reading. The media focus reconciles nicely with the reality-tv exposure plot. The story is more about a television show exploiting a teenage girl and her family and less of an actual story of a disturbed teenage girl. You can just imagine every cheesy graphic and piece of cheap dramatic music that the network put into this fictional documentary.

My interpretation is on the cynical side; the father and the priest were motivated by money/attention to the church respectively. Whether Marjorie is or isn't possessed is clearly not the most important thing given how quickly the psychiatric treatment possibility is blown aside from the family's lack of finances. It's a Breaking Bad sort of situation where a desperate man turns to desperate means to get control of his life and family–in this case a televised exorcism.

Is the book scary? For me, not especially. It is more of an intellectual than emotional ride. I had a lot of fun but I didn't get worked up enough to feel the “chill.” Having the kid, Merry, be at the center did make some disturbing moments though. I felt that vulnerability and helplessness at the idea of something happening to a child.

Part of my emotional distance came from not quite buying into Merry as a character at either stage in her life. Merry as a little girl reads as someone's idea of a “whimsical child” stereotype. Merry as a 23-year old suffers from arrested development. Rather than suggest Tremblay doesn't know how to write girls, I can make sense of this in my head on both counts: Merry is an unreliable narrator and we're seeing her memory of a traumatic childhood experience and of course these are incidents that might have stunted her emotional development. She's an homage to We Have Always Lived in The Castle's Merricat so this presentation makes sense and stays true to the theme of the book.

The twist ending also works well with the theme of uncertainty. What's real and what isn't? What really happened and what is manipulated for the sake of entertainment?