Greg's Reviews > A Head Full of Ghosts

This is a kind of weird experience.

Granted it’s not the first time that Karen has popped up in a book as a character (I can think of two others), but this is the first time that she appears quite a bit (at least by name, as the character isn’t actually supposed to be her). We’ll get back to this later on the review though.

The book is about a family that was once featured on a reality tv show called Possession, which was as the name suggests about demonic possession. The show featured a New England family. Mom, dad, two daughters. And the eldest, a fourteen year-old, was having some kind of mental breakdown and may or may not have been possessed by demons. The reality tv show aired for six episodes and featured the decision of the Catholic Church to perform an exorcism on her.

The story is told from the perspective of the younger daughter about fifteen (I think, that would be about right) years after the events that happened. She’s telling her story to a writer whose writing a book about the television show, the family and the aftermath of the TV show. Exactly what the book is though isn’t clear.

There are scenes with the twenty-something year old Merry (youngest daughter) talking to the author and giving an adult perspective about what had happened; but most of the book is told from the point of view of Merry as a child. These parts stay in character mostly, with only a few moments where she will foreshadow about things that she could only know from a later vantage point.

The third thread of the story is a series of blog posts written by Karen Brissette (aka The Last Girl Online (which is a name I’ve been thinking of calling her from now on, never again using her real name)) for a horror blog. In it she is deconstructing the episodes of the show and using a lot of words that the real Karen would get angry at me if I ever used in a review or conversation. It’s quite funny to me to see her written that way.

The book is excellent. I went into it thinking that it would be amusing but more of interest because of the character of Karen; but I ended up loving the book.

The idea of a novel about a demonic possession isn’t really all that interesting to me. I don’t know if I’m in the minority but I never found The Exorcist that scary or interesting. Either the book or the movie. Maybe in the words of The Usual Suspects, it’s because the devil has played his greatest trick on me by making me believe he doesn’t exist; but the idea of people being possessed by demons I just don’t believe in enough to find it that scary—I guess i just believe that people have enough reasons and causes to go psychotic and do fucked up shit that I just never think of that they are becoming the vessel of a literal incarnate of pure evil.

As a horror novel it’s not all that scary, but the subject matter definitely puts it into that camp—but more in the meta-horror type arena. There is a massive awareness of the genre that it’s writing into, especially in the blog posts by the Last Girl Online that everything is situated within the context of films like The Exorcist, all those possession films that came out a few years ago, The Shining, Evil Deads, etc. Using those to frame the story there are definite questions that keep coming up about the reality of what we are being told (in the fictional universe, it never tries to cross the Brechtian Fourth Wall and make us question if this is actually true (say a la the attempts made by the original Blair Witch Project that tried to play off of the idea that this might actually be all true (did anyone believe that? (I don’t know (yes I’m going nuts with the parentheses here for a reason), but I do know that after seeing the movie in the theaters I personally was a little freaked out, and I heard from a friend that he was more than a little freaked out driving through the half-mile in the woods from the road to his house after going to see it, and he is someone who regularly watched horror movies (what does this say? I don’t know but there was something weirdly powerful about the low-budget movie when it first came out)))). The effect of this style creates an interesting feel to the story, but one which never feels like it’s being overly forced and just meta for the sake of being self-referential and overly clever for the sake of being cute.

This last little bit really is filled with some spoilers, so I’d skip over this, and just maybe take my word that this book is a lot of fun and you should give it a try. But if you've read the book than maybe you’ll be interested in continuing.

(view spoiler)[It’s really the last section of the book that made this book a huge winner for me. Up until then, it was interesting, but there was a big question that I didn’t even realize I’d had about the book. Why was this story being told? I just accepted that it was a re-telling of a short-lived reality TV show, but why exactly would a writer more than a decade later care to write a story about something that one can imagine would have been a curiosity but nothing more. It’s not until near the end of the book that the big reveal comes (that is hinted at earlier in a story, but never explicitly expressed) that Merry’s whole family had been poisoned soon after the events of the show and that she was the sole survivor. Before that there was the feeling that maybe Marjorie dies during the exorcism, which begs the question if she was actually possessed or not.

The reveal and the the story behind what happens comes quickly and by itself is kind of a twisted turn on a book. All through the book I felt like Marjorie is faking, there is no way that she was actually possessed, but there were nods and winks that the story that Marjorie was saying about faking it were not actually true.

But then the ending and the unanswered questions about why Marjorie would get Merry to poison the family—subverting the accepted story that it was the father who was doing this. It seems to open up a lot of questions at the last moment.

And yes there are questions, but then there comes more with an ambiguity even coming over the big reveal that Merry makes about what happens after she had unintentionally poisoned her family at Marjorie’s prodding. It’s a weirdly subtle/unsubtle moment in the coffee shop as she is finishing up telling her story to the writer that the whole story is called into question in another way completely. But this time from a fact given in the previous blog post you have to start wondering if Merry (aka Karen Brissette) isn’t in fact possessed by evil. As their conversation comes to a close and the temperature begins to drop drastically in the coffee shop it seems as if the comment that she had made as Karen in her blog is telling about the presence of evil—mixed with this is the question of the way that Merry was dressed to go to the final meeting with the writer, with her ‘gaudy red coat’ that called back the outfit the 8 year old Merry wore when she was playing reporter—a weird detail that I’m not actually sure what to make of, but put in to the strangeness of this last meeting where the already ambiguous story line basically has a hammer taken to it and destroyed, it feels like it should be saying something.

Normally I’m not a huge fan of more unanswered questions jammed into the last pages of a book, but the way that the big reveals are followed up by even more questions seems to work here, maybe because these questions aren’t all that explicit. They could be chalked up to the trauma Merry experienced as a kid—of they could be calling into question a whole lot of scenes in the book (for example (this has just come to me) Marjorie knew that Merry was possessed the whole time and the whole thing was staged to have her in the room during the exorcism in order to save her… and that the story about Dad being the one who was sick and Marjorie doing all this to get him help was really Merry being the one that was sick (since we are only getting Merry’s view of the story and immediately after she makes this reveal Rachel pretty much says, but that’s not what happened and Marjorie changes the part of where she was found (and that Merry starts the big reveal by asking Rachel what she knows, so she is possibly giving some new info but only in the context of what is already known instead of letting herself give away too much)).

Or Merry just kills her family because they aren’t paying enough attention to her, they don’t buy the Christmas Tree and she didn’t really know what she was doing because she was 8 years old.

I don’t know if the ending was meant to be so open or if I’m just reading into it, but even if it wasn’t intentional I definitely enjoyed it and it probably earned the book it’s final star from me. (hide spoiler)]