![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() None of our narrators here, adult or child Merry, or the blogger, who has secrets of her own, are remotely reliable Marjorie tells her little sister terrifying stories: “I’ll keep your tongue and put it on a string, wear it like a necklace, keep it close against my chest, let it taste my skin until it turns black and shrivels up like all dead things do.” At one point Marjorie is found in her bedroom “clinging to the wall like a spider”, her arms and legs “spread-eagled, with her hands, wrists, feet, and ankles sunk into the wall as though it were slowly absorbing her”. There are multitudes of voices, strange languages and impossible knowledge. Merry – Meredith Barrett – is a 23-year-old woman telling an author about her childhood – how when she was eight, her 14-year-old sister Marjorie suffered a psychotic break, behaving as if she were possessed by a host of spirits. Tremblay’s story, winner of a Bram Stoker award in the US, is told in layer upon layer. I magine a literary horror novel that riffs on one of the best and creepiest short stories out there, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper: “It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!” Then throw in elements of every tale of possession you’ve read or seen, from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House to William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, and you’ll end up with Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, one of the most frightening books I’ve read this, or any, year. ![]()
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