A Head Full of Ghosts/Halloween Horror Novels Part 2

There are different types of horror and some genres of horror crawl underneath your skin more than others. I am not writing about creepy, crawly things….I am talking about books that take a little more time for world building and then once you think you know the characters better they surprise you and take you in directions that are terrifying.

To continue sharing my journey of reading horror novels for Halloween this fall I am going into depth about the book that got under my skin: A Head Full of Ghosts. It is the story of a family of 4 who goes on a reality TV show that is sponsored by the Catholic church. The oldest daughter Marjorie is possessed by a demon and the story is told from the perspective of her younger sister Merry. Merry is an unreliable narrator as she is  young when the story takes place.

WARNING: THE REST OF THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

To combat this demon a priest performs an exorcism. However every thing that he claims is evil coming out of the mouth of Marjorie is actually facts that are scathing about the Catholic church. So there is the question of what constitutes Marjorie being possessed is there. Is it because of the knowledge that she exhibits or is it because of some other force that is going on with her life?

To add to the confusion, Marjorie confesses to Merry that she is only acting like she is possessed because her family needs the money they get from being on this reality show.  Yet Marjorie’s behavior indicates that she is severely mentally disturbed. So  it begs the question as to whether or not she is simply needing more psychological help than she was receiving or if there was something that was beyond herself that was inhabiting her body that was indeed demonic.

There is an exorcism performed by a priest to eliminate the demon. When this ritual takes place, mysterious things happen room that indicate that it could be some kind of supernatural force at play.  Then the question of family dynamics are brought into the picture as well. The parent’s marriage is far from stable.  Marjorie tells Merry that she thinks that her father may be exhibiting behavior that indicates that he is going to lash out and try to kill the whole family. Margorie finds rat poisoning and instructs her sister to put rat poisoning in the family’s spaghetti sauce, which manages to kill everyone in the family except for Merry.

There are so many questions that are unanswered in this narrative. The police reports all indicate that it was their father who poisoned the family’s food. Did Merry really poison the food or was that memory there because she was trying to make sense out of being the only person in her family who lived through this event? Secondly, if her sister Marjorie was the one who told her to poison the food was it an act of self defense out of fear for what she thought their father would do or was it a suicidal attempt???  These are the kinds of questions that put chills down my spine!

The book goes back and forth between a blogger and the Merry’s childhood memories. The blogger is looking back on the reality TV show and writing about it from an objective point of view throughout the book. This gives some serious questions about the nature of reality TV when she makes parallels with what she sees with illusionist techniques that are found in movies and magic shows.  The big twist of the novel is that Merry is the one who is blogging about the show trying to make sense of what happened  in her childhood. This revelation brings out questions regarding her perception of the course of events that she remembered as a child versus her critical analysis of the television show. What account can be trusted???

I’d been reading a lot of horror lately and this has to be the most horrific book I read. The story “Rusty Husk” by Evans Light  in the collection Doorbells at Dusk comes in second to being the most terrifying story I read this season.  The premise of this story was that a human being became a scarecrow and he tries  to prove that he is alive only to scare kids who see him blink. This story frightened me so much that I asked my husband if I put my Kindle in the freezer if it would ruin my Kindle. This comment was  in the spirit of the Friends episode “The One Where Richard and  Monica Are Friends” as Joey talks about how he puts a copy of Stephen King’s The Shining in the freezer when it starts to get too scary. (While this has become an ongoing reference in the horror community to really scary books, I was very obsessed with the TV show “Friends” when I was in my 20s and continuously find myself making references to that show).  However I was not simply trying to find an excuse to reference “Friends”, I was very frightened my this particular story. As a result, A Head Full of Ghosts was not without fierce competition as the scariest book that I read this year.

I also read more fun horror books like Dream Woods and After Life which used supernatural elements in a more goofy way that did not seem nearly as scary as A Head Full of Ghosts. In fact, after the emotional intensity of the A Head Full of Ghosts, a more light read was a break for me. However if the purpose of horror is to terrify the reader, A Head Full of Ghosts is the book that fulfills this level of terror the most for me.  The kinds of questions that it provoked after I read it continued to haunt me days after I finished the book.