A Head Full of Ghosts

Marjorie Barrett begins behaving strangely at fourteen. Her father, recently unemployed and recently returned to Catholicism, becomes convinced she is possessed. A production company offers money for access.

The Possession airs for six episodes. Fifteen years later Marjorie's younger sister Merry, who was eight at the time, is interviewed about it by a writer.

A possession, a television crew, and a family that needed the money.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The narration moves between Merry's adult interview, her eight-year-old perception, and blog posts analysing the television programme written pseudonymously.

Each layer knows things the others do not, and the blog in particular exists to complicate the reader's interpretation of scenes they have just read. Tremblay is careful that no layer is authoritative, and the reader is left assembling an account from three sources that each have reasons to distort.

The father's unemployment and the family's financial situation are established as the reason the television offer is accepted, and the novel keeps this in view throughout.

The horror is therefore structural as well as supernatural: a family's crisis becomes content because they need the money, and the production shapes what happens.

The novel sustains both explanations with genuine rigour: Marjorie's behaviour is consistent with acute psychiatric illness and with the traditional account, and each is supported.

The ambiguity is never resolved, and Tremblay is careful that neither reading requires ignoring evidence. Tremblay consulted on the psychiatric material and the symptoms described map onto a recognised presentation, which is what keeps the alternative reading genuinely live.

She is intelligent, frightened, aware that she is being observed, and possibly performing some of what is happening to her.

The novel's most unsettling proposition is that she may be complicit in producing the story her family needs, and that this is itself a symptom.

The pseudonymous horror blog analysing The Possession as a text is the book's cleverest device, identifying genre borrowings and production manipulations in episodes the reader has just experienced as narrative.

It is also funny, and its eventual identification of its author is the novel's best single turn.

The book is explicitly conscious of The Exorcist and of the reality-television format, and discusses both within its own text.

The self-awareness could be glib and is not, because Tremblay uses the references to make an argument about how such stories are constructed rather than simply to acknowledge them.

The eight-year-old's perspective is the novel's most successful writing: she understands that something is wrong, misinterprets specifics, and is frequently more concerned with being included than with being safe.

Her adult reconstruction of that perspective is unreliable in the specific way memory is, and the book is precise about the difference.

There is a sequence involving a family meal that is among the most distressing set pieces in recent horror, and it contains nothing supernatural.

Tremblay is at his best when the horror is a person behaving badly in a situation the reader recognises. It is also the scene most readers remember, and it demonstrates that the novel's real interest is in what people do to each other under pressure.

The final disclosure recontextualises the entire narrative and is genuinely shocking, and it is also fairly prepared.

Whether it resolves the central ambiguity is itself contested among readers, which is probably the intended outcome. Rereading the book with the final disclosure in hand changes a substantial number of scenes, which is the standard test of whether a twist has been earned.

It is short and reads very quickly, with short chapters and a great deal of dialogue.

The compression is a strength: a longer version would have dissipated the ambiguity, which depends on the reader not having time to settle into either explanation. It is also considerably funnier than a summary suggests, largely through the blog sections, and the humour makes the darker material land harder by contrast.

Readers who want horror that is genuinely about something — media, family, money — and who enjoy unreliable narration.

It is among the better recent literary horror novels and requires no knowledge of the genre, though readers who know The Exorcist will get an additional layer.