A Head Full Of Ghosts (2014) by Paul Tremblay: A Head Full Of Ghosts feels like part of a fictional conversation that began with Ray Russell's The Case Against Satan (1962) and continued through William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1971) and on into all those found-footage possession and ghostly infestation movies in the Paranormal Activity, Insidious, and Conjuring franchises.
It's a superior novel that deals with its own possession case even as it also interrogates and discusses how possession cases have been represented in various media, whether presented fictionally or as "based on a true story." People don't remember now that The Exorcist itself was repeatedly framed by Blatty and the film-makers as being inspired by a "true story" of possession.
Like Great Expectations or To Kill A Mockingbird, A Head Full Of Ghosts is a retrospective narrative. 23-year-old Meredith "Merry" Barrett tells the "untold story" of her 14-year-old sister Marjorie's possession to a writer working on a book about that possession, a possession which occurred 15 years earlier when Merry was 8.
Tremblay's first bit of play here is to have the present-day of the novel be in "our" future, with the events of the past apparently occurring some time around 2014. He clearly wanted this possession to occur in "our" media world of the Internet, Twitter, YouTube, cell phones, and so on, and so forth. He does not invest "the future" with any flying cars or space colonies, so don't get too excited about that "future retrospective."
But wait, there's more! Posts from a blogger named Karen Brissette are interpolated into Merry's narrative. Brissette synopsizes and analyzes the possession, or more accurately, The Possession. That would be the six-episode reality series that made Marjorie and the rest of the Barretts a five-week media wonder.
Among other things, Brissette's blog evaluates The Possession as a narrative structured around father John's economic and social "failure" as he's a white, middle-class man who's been recently put out of work by downsizing and who, in his woes, has returned to a fervent, retrograde Roman Catholicism to explain Marjorie's condition which, as Merry's retelling begins, has been diagnosed as some form of mental illness -- perhaps incipient schizophrenia.
Sarah Barrett, still holding down a job, doesn't believe any of the religious crap her husband increasingly extols. But she's also rapidly being exhausted by being the sole breadwinner in the family while also trying to deal with the time and mental demands of whatever the Hell is making Marjorie's life miserable.
Got all that?
So as A Head Full Of Ghosts writes its own narrative of demonic possession, it also evaluates many of the narratives of possession Pop Culture has dropped on us over the years. And it evaluates the media. And religious faith, and religious mania. All while Tremblay creates convincing, complex characters -- especially with Merry and Marjorie.
There are several major interpretations of what "really" happened offered by the novel, but they are intertwined and not necessarily mutually exclusive of one another. Marjorie may really be possessed. Marjorie may be mentally ill. John Barrett may be possessed. John may be mentally ill. Merry may be possessed. Merry may be mentally ill.
At the very least, even Merry isn't entirely certain of the truthfulness of all her memories during that traumatic five weeks. And she's also aware that certain things remain unexplained or unsolved. The ambiguity Tremblay creates actually increases the horror of the situation. The Exorcist offered proof that there really was a demon at work inside Regan's head. A Head Full Of Ghosts offers no such certainty. Or does it?
The recent HBO adaptation of Gillian Flynn's 2006 novel Sharp Objects seems to have brought the generally lamentable fictional trope of the evil child/ teenager back into prominence, as seen in Flynn's book and in novels like Lionel Shriver's ludicrous, over-praised We Need To Talk About Kevin. Of course, The Exorcist's Regan is a forerunner of the mysteriously evil child/teen. So, too, the potentially possessed in The Case Against Satan. And on to the army of demon-haunted or demon-following or demon-possessed children in the Insidious movies and so on, and so forth.
However, Tremblay's Marjorie is a believable, sympathetic character whose ultimate spiritual and moral states are haunting and, possibly, left to the reader to decide upon. Merry, in her 23-year-old self remembering her 8-year-old self, is also a believable creation whose memories may or may not be believed. This is adult horror in the sense that it doesn't cheap out with a melodramatic teen monster collecting the teeth of her victims in a doll house. The ending chills the reader, and then chills the reader just a bit more. Highly recommended.
The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell (1962): Published nine years before William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist became a best-seller, Ray Russell's The Case Against Satan bears a marked similarity to that far better-known work. A doubting Roman Catholic priest finds himself called upon to investigate what may be the demonic possession of a teen-aged girl. Soon, he'll be forced to perform the Rite of Exorcism in concert with an older bishop whose faith is far more secure. But is the doubting priest's faith up to it?
Russell was the fiction editor for Playboy in the 1950's and 1960's. But he was also a skilled writer whose legacy lives on primarily because of his clever horror stories, most notably "Sardonicus," which spawned a William Castle movie but also remains a triumphant homage to the writing style of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Russell often seemed more at home in the skin of other times, as a period piece ("Sanguinarius") about the bloody Countess, Elizabeth Bathory, was also a model of how to stay true to the style of an earlier era.
The Case Against Satan isn't an homage or a pastiche, however. It's a pretty thoroughly modern novel -- for 1962 America -- with a thoroughly modern protagonist, Father Gregory Sargent. He's plagued by doubts and drink and an abiding lack of faith in the existence of evil as a being, Satan, rather than simply a random, mindless thing.
Russell allows for more ambivalence than Blatty did: even at the end of the novel, some doubts could conceivably remain about who or what Father Sargent has been exorcising. Real-world psychological trauma seems to have instigated the possession. Human evil is at work in the life of 16-year-old Susan Garth. Is it all simply human?
The possession and exorcism scenes are effective and often chilling. Indeed, one of the most chilling moments comes when the Bishop acknowledges that the exorcism might kill Susan -- and chooses to go on anyway because the alternative is far worse in his eyes. Anyone who's heard of the deaths of people being exorcised, even in the past ten years or so, will probably find this decision to be extremely disquieting. But this is a novel, not a pro-exorcism pamphlet or a news story: demons can exist with certainty here. Perhaps.
The characters and situations sometimes tend towards the melodramatic. This is a novel about exorcism, after all, the most potentially melodramatic Catholic rite I can think of. Father Sargent is skillfully drawn, however, as a sympathetic and flawed figure whose doubts seem to have been designed to mirror the doubts of the casual reader.
Susan Garth is a little more sketchily drawn -- our sympathies for her emanate from the terrible things she's being put through far moreso than they do from any development of her character. Only an almost stereotypical housekeeper (seriously, I swear she's Mrs. McCarthy from the BBC's current Father Brown series) needs greater depth and clarity; that she's also there to provide a miraculously well-timed anecdote about exorcism in the small (Irish?) town of her birth does not help one's suspension of disbelief.
Of course, our priest and our bishop also ponder the coincidences required to set up the events of the novel, and decide that God has been putting things in place. Metafictionally, that God is of course Ray Russell.
The Case Against Satan also brings in a brusque but ultimately sympathetic homicide detective; an inquisitive Roman Catholic layperson who's a pillar of the Church community and knows it; a squirmy widower as Susan's father; and a former priest of the parish, Father Halloran (Stephen King, take note!), with something to hide. Only an anti-Catholic pamphleteer seems like a complete misstep. He serves a plot function that could probably have taken care of itself.
He also seems anachronistic to us now, which couldn't have been helped: this was an America of 1962 that had just gotten used to the idea of its first Roman Catholic president, after all, with all the debates and acrimony over the suitability of such a religionist for America's highest political post. How time flies. American Roman Catholics were yesterday's American Muslims.
In all, The Case Against Satan is a brisk and entertaining read. Some intellectually interesting questions arise as the plot progresses, most interesting a discussion about the Seal of the Confessional. Russell works for the most part in a plain style, putting the ideas and characters at the forefront. The Case Against Satan may be a better novel than The Exorcist. It certainly got there first. Highly recommended.
