Erica's Reviews > A Head Full of Ghosts

Straight up and first off: I 100% read this because of karen; I probably would never have touched it, otherwise.
I should probably also admit that I went into this with very low expectations. It had been a self-published book, first, and I don’t do well with those. While I understood this had been picked up by a publishing house and was probably cleaned-up nicely, I still had reservations.

Fine. I’ll say it. At the risk of offending the author (which I think I’ve done in a couple of comment threads already), who I know reads these reviews because I keep seeing him pop up on all my friends’ reviews, I didn’t think this was going to be an enjoyable reading experience. I’ve already whined elsewhere about how horror isn’t scary to me so I usually don’t read it PLUS possession stories make me roll my eyes, as I am not a believer of demons or religion or anything else like that so I thought this could possibly get three stars but would probably wind up with two.

So I was wrong. Sue me (don’t actually do that, it would make for a terrible lawsuit)

The horror/possession aspect of the story did nothing for me for the reasons mentioned above. It was the psychological showcase that fascinated the hell out of me. SO MUCH FUN!
Here’s why but, first, to quote Karen Brissette, blogger: Beware of spoilers. I WILL SPOIL YOU
(view spoiler)[This all starts out with Rachel Neville, author, wearer of buttons the size of kitten-heads, hanging out with Meredith, nicknamed Merry, interviewing her about Merry’s childhood experience with a demon-possessed sister named Marjorie and the reality show that centered on their family during that time.

We��ve got three different points-of-view going on here.
Adult Merry talking to Rachel;
Childhood Merry as remembered by adult Merry but shown through the eyes of the eight-year-old;
Blogger Karen Brissette giving a retrospective on the TV show “Possession” which aired in 2000 (it’s now 2015)

First, I want to say a thing or two about Karen Brissette, blogger.
I completely see karen’s influence, only it’s skewed a bit, warped to the more flamboyant, maybe? It’s like if karen wrote for Grav3yardgirl.
But then there are times when karen, herself, shows through...nearly verbatim.
We watch from the spaces between their spaces and that’s always where the monster dwells
I’m pretty sure that was all cribbed from an actual review. Maybe two reviews mooshed together. (Not her review of this book, in which she also quotes that line; two other reviews, I mean) But that is all karen. (are you getting weirded out by this, karen? An analysis of your writing style vs. the style of the character who was named after you?) Of course, the blog post then goes on to yell, “DWELLS, I say!” which is not karen-in-verbatim but is certainly in the spirit of karen’s playfulness.
Regardless, whenever it was her turn to talk, I grinned. She was, of course, my favorite part because I--eeeee-I-eeeee-I will always loooooove yooooooOOOOOOoooooo, karen.

But back to everything else.
The three points-of-view above, they are all very separate for the first half-ish of the story. Adult Merry in 2015 has a veneer of coolness over a damaged inner self. Probably that’s true for a lot of people, actually. 2000’s childhood Merry is clumsily remembered; it felt like adult Merry was misrepresenting her childhood self, making her out to be more along the lines of what adults think of when they consider a hyper, irritating kid, focusing on her grabby hands, on her lazy eye and black plastic glasses, on her overall childishness. Then 2015 Karen comes on the scene with a blog post, tying the two Merrys together with her discussion of the reality show that eight-year-old Merry lived through and adult Merry is relating to an author.

But then the lines begin to blur. Something shifts - and I don’t remember what because I didn’t write it down and I am not going to spend the time going through these CDs to find it again, but I think it happened in the fourth disc - and the Merrys begin to come together. Adult Merry has told Rachel that she (Merry) writes a horror blog under the pseudonym Karen Brissette. Rachel, who now sounds more like a therapist and less like an author, though we all know therapists write books, too, eases Merry back into her memories of the time Marjorie suffered from...something and as adult Merry returns us to her childhood, Little Merry begins to take over and she sounds less grown-up-version-of-a-kid and more like an actual, believable kid. Her restless energy and need for attention are familiar to the adult listener but also to that deep-down memory of being a restless kid whose life is centered in a household, around a family. The unfairness of not getting the desired amount of attention from other family members, the unrecognized neediness that can’t be controlled, a second-grader as someone who has a taste of world experience but is still tethered to the safety of home, someone who still has irrational fears and an active imagination, it all felt genuine. I remembered having those feelings and needs, something I hadn’t connected with when Merry had been remembering her child self earlier in the story.

The point is: Who is Merry, really? A terribly unreliable narrator, that’s who! and if it’s true that she’s Karen, she’s also terribly messed-up and not managing ok at all. We can’t trust her at any point in the story and we only have her tale to go on. Thus, the psychological suspense - it’s the reader vs. the narrator. Who’s right? Who’s sane? (Not me!)

So we, the readers, have to figure out what happened in Merry’s past, relying on her faulty memory, a memory that may be her own or may be an echo of the oft-viewed TV show of her life. At one point she even says, “...I have blocked it or somehow conflated the general unreality of our show with what actually happened” and I think that’s a very important piece of this story, a sort of keystone that we have to keep in mind as we listen to what she remembers and what she tells Rachel and what she says on her blog.

Backing out to look at the family is more disturbing. It starts out with an already tense set of parents, though Miss Merry Monkey doesn’t know the source of discomfort. We can probably safely assume it has something to do with the father’s long stint of unemployment and the subsequent fall-out but there may be more, it’s hard to tell.
However, when religion comes into play, a dividing line is drawn with the father on the Catholic side and the mother on the secular side. When medical science doesn’t seem to help Marjorie with her problems and money becomes a huge concern for the household, Sarah, the mother, agrees to two things which seem to have been introduced and sold to her by her husband, John, via the Church in the form of Father Wanderly: She agrees to let the Catholic church help heal her broken daughter and she also agrees to have the exorcism televised as a reality show.
The chasm opens.

I’d like to point out how cruel it is to introduce religion into a household that was previously without and doing so during a stressful time was especially problematic. It seemed that John had always wanted to have a more religious household but I got the sense he was too lazy to keep it up, himself, and since his wife didn’t believe, he let it go early on, only calling on his fair-weather faith when things got to be more than he felt he could control. It seemed he had been receiving comfort and support from his Church for awhile but was just now introducing it back into his household and Sarah wasn’t pleased. Neither were the children. John effectively alienated himself from the womenfolk of the family and, in doing so, became both a tormentor and a pathetic placeholder instead of a father. His fall from grace was even documented for the TV show.

You know what? This could have been my family. The mother who smokes and is trying to run a household but has essentially given up, the father who isn’t helping out both because he’s not bringing in an income and because he’s not picking up the slack at home during his time of unemployment, and the two daughters who are sometimes very close and sometimes at each other’s throats. My dad is Roman Catholic by birth but not by practice (until his mother came to visit and suddenly, we prayed at the dinner table and went to church) while my smoker mother has her own religion that only she knows the rules to and it doesn’t involve the Bible or bearded-white-guy God. Then there’s me and my siblings. I think had I come down with a problem similar to Marjorie’s, things may have played out none-too-differently in my childhood home. Well, except for the reality show. They’d have had to have made a bad 80’s movie, instead. Or a documentary. But not a reality show because those were not a thing when I was 14.

But back to the book: So many questions were raised in my little pea brain!
*Was Marjorie possessed or was she experiencing the beginnings of a mental illness or personality disorder that was blossoming with puberty? Or was she, like Merry, so desperate for attention that she created this scenario and played it out, realizing too late that she’d overdone it? OR was this something her father cooked up and had her perform in order to get the family out of debt?
*How much of Marjorie was written and directed by the TV show? Did Ken write everything Marjorie said on camera, as Karen seems to think? Or was that sometimes really her?
*And what about John? He read as bipolar to me, the kind Gabe has, not manic/depressive. A lot of his actions and reactions were very recognizable. Was he the one who was really possessed, like Marjorie said? Did he have an illness that he’d passed on to his daughter(s) and how did that illness manifest when he was alone all day with the girls while Sarah was working at the bank? Or was he a pawn of the church who was losing membership and needed a gimmick to get them back into the public eye and he was the perfect dupe in the right place at the right time?
*You know what I found creepy? Karen starts using “Yeah?” in her blog posts in the same fashion Marjorie had used “Yeah?” when talking to adults. Is Merry channeling Marjorie (not literally) as she relives her past for Rachel, are her memories of her sister leaking out into her blog? Is Merry really Merry or is she Marjorie, the story all switched around?
*Is Merry really Karen or has she glommed onto the site and co-opted it as her own? Who would even check to see if that’s the case, if Rachel didn’t? If Merry is Karen, then is she also suffering from a personality disorder as perhaps her sister did? As Rachel pointed out, Karen’s thoughts and observations are definitely presented as Outsider and you’d think Merry’s knowledge would leak in but that doesn’t seem to happen. Yes, she could be a phenomenal writer/actress, which would make sense what with her sister’s imaginative influence over her own highly active childhood imagination as well as all the practice at being in front of the camera at such a young age but it would also make sense for trauma to have caused a split in her personality and she’s both Merry, the person who lost her entire family in the winter of 2000, and Karen, a fan of horror who has a particular observational fascination with Merry’s story. When she is questioned about this directly, she glosses over and moves on. Could it be that she is just trying to present her case in a logical, reasonable fashion in a way that will enable other people to listen and not discount her as being too close to the situation? Or is she still wrestling with it all, trying to make sense of it, trying to explain everything away and using Karen as her medium to sanity? Does she know? Do we? I don’t.
*The Growing Things story: Prognostication or Merry’s personal revisionist history? Did Marjorie really tell that story, effectively foretelling the future, or did Merry make it up afterward and it’s become part of her memories? Was John really as unstable and weak as Merry made him out to be or did she hate him for other reasons and villainized him, as a result, afterward, via the story of him poisoning Sarah which, in turn, explained his plan to kill his family, a sort of “Marjorie warned me” understanding?
*How’d Merry really survive all this, why was she the one spared, reeeeaaaaaally? And did she survive intact? Or is she really horribly scarred, traumatized, and broken and that’s what we’re really seeing here? Is she truly a murderer or is that her revenge/guilt fantasy? Did the demon in Marjorie bring the end all about, making good on the “You’ll all die” threat?
*”What is the truth, Merry?” (hide spoiler)]

LIKES:
<3 Tremblay really got the sister thing down. Nailed it, I’d say.
<3 Marjorie and Merry used Richard Scarry books, ones that I own in real life!, to create worlds of their own, illustrating the power of imagination and the usefulness of books and stories.
<3 Karen called-out the stereotypical possession cliches: vomit and masturbation, virginal girls gone corrupted, the holiness of church men and their ability to take control which is all so stupid and I hate it so Thank you, Karen! Thank you!
<3 All the thoughts and questions I was left with concerning Merry and Marjorie, what was fabricated by whom and why and will the truth ever come to light? Dude, I’m going to be mulling this stuff over for weeks!

Nitpickiness:
>:{ Merry said she was watching “Teen Titans” while the grown ups talked in the other room only if this took place in 2000, then she was not watching that cartoon because “Teen Titans” didn’t start ‘til 2003. That could be Merry being unreliable again or it could be lack of fact-checking. Either way, it made me squinch my eyes with the “I don’t think so” look.

Unknown:
The creepy music at the end of the CD may be an off-kilter music-box version of “Gloomy Sunday,” which would be clever and cool, but, not knowing the song well enough, I can’t tell whether or not that is actually the case.

Wrapping it up:
Horror may not be my thing but psychological suspense sure is and this story definitely scratched that itch nicely.
Four strong stars for the story and one whole star for karen. Because I love her.