{"id":8253,"date":"2015-09-23T13:04:52","date_gmt":"2015-09-23T17:04:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cemeterydanceonline.com\/?p=6881"},"modified":"2015-09-23T13:04:52","modified_gmt":"2015-09-23T17:04:52","slug":"review-a-head-full-of-ghosts-by-paul-tremblay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cemeterydance.com\/extras\/review-a-head-full-of-ghosts-by-paul-tremblay\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: &#039;A Head Full of Ghosts&#039; by Paul Tremblay"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Head-Full-Ghosts-Novel\/dp\/0062363239\" target=\"_blank\"><strong><em><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-6882\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.cemeterydance.com\/extras\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/HeadFullGhostsCover-199x300.jpg?resize=199%2C300\" alt=\"HeadFullGhostsCover\" width=\"199\" height=\"300\" \/>A Head Full of Ghosts<\/em>\u00a0by Paul Tremblay<\/strong><\/a><br \/>\n<strong>William Morrow\u00a0(June 2015)<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>304\u00a0pages; $14.58 paperback\/$12.99 ebook<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Reviewed by\u00a0Michael Wilson<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Paul Tremblay&#8217;s fiction has been gracing bookstores and bookshelves for well over a decade. No stranger to horror, Paul&#8217;s picked up three Stoker Award nominations \u2013 including First Novel for <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Little Sleep <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u2013 and has been on the Board of Directors for the Shirley Jackson Award since it was founded in 2007. In spite of all his accolades,\u00a0<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A Head Full of Ghosts <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">has put him on the horror map more than anything he&#8217;s released or achieved previously. It&#8217;s the horror novel of 2015 that everyone&#8217;s talking about. Even Stephen King took to Twitter to give his approval, declaring, &#8220;<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A Head Full of Ghosts<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, by Paul Tremblay: Scared the living hell out of me, and I&#8217;m pretty hard to scare.&#8221; But is such unadulterated admiration really warranted or are we dealing with over-hyped and under-delivered horror art? <\/span><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We&#8217;ve seen a great deal of updates to classic horror tropes in recent years. New takes on the vampire, zombie, werewolf and ghost story have flooded bookshop horror sections worldwide. But an update to the humble exorcism story has for the most part been missing, until now. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A Head Full of Ghosts <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">tells the story of the Barratt family and the chaos that ensues when their fourteen-year-old daughter Marjorie begins to behave uncharacteristically. The narrative is primarily presented through the eyes of Marjorie&#8217;s younger sister, eight-year-old Merry (yes that&#8217;s a nod to Shirley Jackson&#8217;s Merricat), but is also told through a series of blog posts, an interview with twenty-three-year old Merry and the reality television show following the family, <em>The Possession<\/em>. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The story lives up to the hype and is surely an early contender for horror novel of the year. Tremblay manages to pack a treasure chest of horror culture references into his novel (some blatant, some obscure \u2013 there&#8217;s even a cameo from an alternative version of Stephen Graham Jones) but does so in a way that serves the story without coming across as self-indulgent. This is a story for horror fans written by a heart-on-the-sleeve horror fan. Yet it&#8217;s so much more than that. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There&#8217;s a sense of unease from the get-go that never lets up because we never quite understand what it is that&#8217;s happening to Marjorie. Such is the ambiguity in Marjorie&#8217;s malady that it creates marital tensions between the Barratt parents. Marjorie&#8217;s mother, Sarah, seeks treatment for Marjorie through healthcare and medical professions whereas Marjorie&#8217;s father, John, turns to religion and local priest Father Wanderly. The tension is intensified further when, struggling to meet their mounting medical bills, the family let a camera crew into their house to film <em>The Possession<\/em>. The exploitative nature of reality television and how it&#8217;s often anything but &#8220;reality&#8221;\u00a0is left exposed as are the family to the unsupportive general public. Perhaps it&#8217;s the undignified way the Barratts are treated that is scariest of all; or perhaps it&#8217;s the fact a mentally ill girl becomes a circus attraction for the entertainment of the masses; then again, perhaps what&#8217;s really scary is attempting to medicate a girl possessed by something otherworldly\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tremblay refuses to provide black-and-white answers, refuses to take shortcuts and demands that we, too, contemplate the genesis of Marjorie&#8217;s sickness. Yet we will never find the answers, just incomplete fragments reflected on broken glass. And so the possession continues beyond the page. So open <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A Head Full of Ghosts<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> at your discretion, because once opened, gentle reader, it can never truly be closed. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Head Full of Ghosts\u00a0by Paul Tremblay William Morrow\u00a0(June 2015) 304\u00a0pages; $14.58 paperback\/$12.99 ebook Reviewed by\u00a0Michael Wilson Paul Tremblay&#8217;s fiction has been gracing bookstores and bookshelves for well over a decade. No stranger to horror, Paul&#8217;s picked up three Stoker Award nominations \u2013 including First Novel for The Little Sleep \u2013 and has been on &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cemeterydance.com\/extras\/review-a-head-full-of-ghosts-by-paul-tremblay\/\" class=\"more-link button bg-gold white\">Continue Reading!<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Review: &#039;A Head Full of Ghosts&#039; by Paul Tremblay&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[80],"tags":[433,42,434,435,79,436],"class_list":["post-8253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-a-head-full-of-ghosts","tag-featured","tag-michael-wilson","tag-paul-tremblay","tag-reviews","tag-william-morrow"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Review: &#039;A Head Full of Ghosts&#039; 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