A Head Full Of Ghosts walks the fine line between the supernatural and the psychological, exploring the very nature of evil through one young girl, perhaps schizophrenic, perhaps possessed. It’s scary, it’s poignant and it is sharp. Exactly what you’d expect from Paul Tremblay.
WINNER OF THE 2015 BRAM STOKER AWARD FOR SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN A NOVEL
A chilling thriller that brilliantly blends psychological suspense and supernatural horror, reminiscent of Stephen King's The Shining, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, and William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist.
The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia.
To her parents’ despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie’s descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help. Father Wanderly suggests an exorcism; he believes the vulnerable teenager is the victim of demonic possession. He also contacts a production company that is eager to document the Barretts’ plight. With John, Marjorie’s father, out of work for more than a year and the medical bills looming, the family agrees to be filmed, and soon find themselves the unwitting stars of The Possession, a hit reality television show. When events in the Barrett household explode in tragedy, the show and the shocking incidents it captures become the stuff of urban legend.
Fifteen years later, a bestselling writer interviews Marjorie’s younger sister, Merry. As she recalls those long ago events that took place when she was just eight years old, long-buried secrets and painful memories that clash with what was broadcast on television begin to surface—and a mind-bending tale of psychological horror is unleashed, raising vexing questions about memory and reality, science and religion, and the very nature of evil.
Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the nationally bestselling author of The Beast You Are, The Pallbearers Club, Survivor Song, Growing Things and Other Stories, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted into the Universal Pictures film Knock at the Cabin. He lives outside Boston with his family.
“For us, horror stories are a long, dark, scary tunnel. You hear sounds you don’t want to hear; you see things that are going to stick in your head. But if you keep putting one foot after the other, that speck of light at the end is going to grow a little bit bigger and […]
Summer is coming. Though that phrase likely doesn’t quite inspire the sort of dread “winter is coming” evokes if you’re a book lover, you know that everything heats up during the summer, including the release schedules for some of the world’s best thriller writers. If you need help making your upcoming summer reading list a little more chilling, […]
Tremblay’s novel A Head Full of Ghosts “scared the living hell out of me, and I’m pretty hard to scare,” King said. That goes a long way toward explaining why Tremblay has been anointed one of the new masters of horror, and why his work has picked up Bram Stoker and British Fantasy awards, among […]
But rather than simply pit his human protagonists against a group of inhuman monsters, Tremblay uses the tight confines of their cabin and the tense atmosphere and breathless pacing of the home-invasion narrative to delve deeper into the psyches of all of his characters, both victims and perpetrators, and explore the mindset that would allow […]
We decided to do something a bit different this month—instead of just one Mind Meld at the end of the month, we’re doing four, covering four times as many of our favorite scary reads. We’ve asked our bookish friends near and far about their current favorite horror favorites, and are breaking them out by the […]
