- A head full of ghosts. Paul Tremblay. Fourteen-year-old Marjorie Barrett has been displaying bizarre, increasingly disturbing behavior. Undiagnosed illness or demonic possession? Either way, her family does not have the means to treat it properly. Father John’s borderline zealotry and mother Sarah’s skepticism both crash against the harsh reality of poverty. And so, they opt for an unlikely solution: Allow themselves to be filmed for an horror reality tv show called ‘The Possession’, which will culminate with a live broadcast of an exorcism! Years later Marjorie’s younger sister, Meredith, is giving a tell-all interview even as blogger Karen reviews “The Possession” episode by episode —will they solve the puzzle at the heart of the real horror that went beyond the existence of demons?
What could easily be mistaken for yet another run-of-the-mill possession tale is quickly revealed to be much more interested in meta-textual games than in cliché scares. Much is made of the tropes found in famous horror fiction and the ways in which they shape our own expectations of where these stories are supposed to go. Much, too, of the often exploitative nature of mass media, be it reality tv, viral publicity, paid rabble-rousers at protests, assorted clergy and medical personnel hired as publicists...
Now, one problem with the book is that for most of it it’s very interesting… but never quite scary. The actual possession often strikes us as unconvincing. And while we feel for eight-year-old Meredith (or “Merry”, hint-hint), for most of the book she fells less like a survivor of trauma than as an adult romanticizing her childhood memories.
All of which is, in fact, part of this book’s ultimately clever misdirection…
SPOILERS AHEAD!
Because as it turns out, every voice we have been hearing in this book, every ghost in the head (or in the machine?) is Merry herself. Blogger Karen is a pen name, and both past and present are narrated by her. And it’s only in the last chapters were we discover how carefully she has crafted a story to cover the real horror.
And what is the horror? Not the possession, but that a month after “The possession” ended, John supposedly poisoned and killed himself and his family, with Merry the only survivor.
Except, that is also a lie. Merry is the one who poisoned them!
Why, the reader is immediately compelled to ask. Under orders of Marjorie? Because Merry was the one possessed all along?
We don’t know and we can’t know —because what we do know is that she has perfected the technique of using stories to hide the truth, whatever it might be. Even as a child, she and Marjorie would make up yarns to hint at what they were planning to do and what they desired (a story about pets, a murder mystery about a wicked father). As Karen, she is able to separate herself from her own real life in order to turn it into a Gothic tale, disturbing reporter Rachel in the process.
Even in the midst of her confession, it would seem that we have been distracted by a “is the girl possessed or not” yarn so we would fail to notice the other story: “Is the father having a breakdown and everybody failed to notice?”. But even that is a story, half-remembered memories rearranged into a seemingly coherent narrative.
Perhaps the head full of ghosts is that of Merry, and that of Marjorie and probably that of Rachel as well: It is the head of the story-teller.
SPOILERS END
The result is a book that recalls the best carefully constructed fictions of Ira Levin, Peter Straub and even the best William Peter Blatty —not that of ‘The exorcist’, but that of the much-maligned and quite underrated “Twinkle, twinkle Killer Kane” (rather than his own more banal remake, “The ninth configuration”). An intriguing read, more recommended for fans of ‘weird fiction’ than of only horror per se.
P. S. For those interested in literary themes, notice the recurrent allusions to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic gothic yarn (or is it?) “The yellow wallpaper”, and see if you can deduce how it ties to the story we have been reading.
