3. A Head Full of Ghosts

By Paul Tremblay  

Olman ordered a bunch of books during the 2020 pandemic, and very thoughtfully got me Monster, She Wrote.  This was how I heard of A Head Full of Ghosts, which I noted down as being heavily influenced by Shirley Jackson.  However, Goodreads gave it mixed reviews, so I didn’t make a move to acquire it for many months.  

Last Xmas holiday, during my ten-day stay with the in-laws, I realized I had not stepped foot inside Dark Carnival at all!  On my last day, I went in to browse but didn’t find anything. The only thing I was semi-interested in was the new release, My Heart Is a Chainsaw (whose author Tremblay also name-checked in his liner notes), but I wasn’t ready to commit to a hardback.  Then our flight got delayed due to me testing positive!  As I was isolating in the carriage house, I saw on the internet that a film adaptation of A Head Full of Ghosts was in production.  I was able to get tested again the next day and I was negative (I never had symptoms and the home test kits also gave me a negative result), so I can only surmise that the first test was a false positive.   But I’m glad we only had to delay our flight by one day.  

After I got my negative result, I decided to call Dark Carnival just to ask if they (well he, the owner) had A Head Full of Ghosts.  Sure enough, he did.   I went over there 10 minutes later sporting my N95, a copy was sitting on top of a tall stack of paperbacks in front of Jack, the taciturn owner (I had to ask my MIL his name when I got back, as she'd been consciously cultivating a first name relations with him over the years!).

And miracles of miracles, when I was buying the book, Jack actually initiated a conversation with me!  

He started with an approval of sorts, “I heard good things about it.”  (I assumed he meant the book that I was purchasing from him.)

He continued, “Don’t know about that awful cover though. Trying to be from the 70’s or something, like it's trying to be all, uh…”

“… Evocative?”, I offered.

“Yeah, and that photo looking all…”  He trails off again.

“Overexposed?", I volunteered.

He merely nodded.

I said thanks and parted ways.  And that was my interaction/transaction with Jack, the owner of Dark Carnival.

When I started reading A Headfull… back in Montreal, I didn’t pay the cover much attention.  Like Jack, I didn’t think much of the bleached out, contrasty image of what looked like the staircase of an old house.  After I’d finished the book, I realized that the image was rotated sideways.  I turned it to the correct position, and it now looked like the stairway and landing of the Barrett family house.  I thought that was kinda cool. 

Overall, A Head Full of Ghosts was a nicely written, engaging horror story.  Tremblay set up the situation well and the relationship between the sisters was believable, as well as the POV of youngest family member Merry.  The build up of tension and atmosphere of impending doom was done well.  And I liked that the supernatural factors were kept ambiguous.  In the end you don’t know if Marjorie was possessed by a demonic entity, and/or had psychic abilities and/or if she was only a normally gifted person suffering from schizophrenia.  

Unusually, the author wrote an afterword citing all kinds of pop culture references that influenced his novel, including extended “liner notes” or “DVD extras”.  What a treasure trove!  Obvs, Shirley Jackson was revered as the biggest influence.  I mean, the narrator’s nickname was Merry, a direct homage to one of my fave literary characters in We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Not only that, Tremblay and couple-authors, Cox and Langan, founded and continue to administer the Shirley Jackson awards.  This guy is a real serious SJ fan and horror aficionado.

Tremblay also brought up Session 9 as a brilliant and underrated horror film.  Serendipitously, not long after I finished A Head Full.., Olman read a twitter post that also listed Session 9 as an underrated film horror fans should watch.  After having watched Session 9 together (in late March), I saw how Tremblay took inspiration from the open-ended ambiguities there, too.

Tremblay also name dropped older contemporary peers, Clive Barker and Peter Straub.  I now remember, to my dismay, that I no longer possess the 1984 paperback volumes of The Books of Blood (which featured Barker’s illustrations on the cover).  I can’t remember how I came to have them, but I was young, like still in high school.  When the old Central VPL was on Burrard & Robson, I remember going to a Clive Barker reading of The Great and Secret Show, and having him sign my hardcover copy of Weaveworld (I read the library copy of TG&SS and was disappointed by it). So based on this memory, I must have acquired The Books of Blood as a teenager.  And got rid of them several years laster when I was moving around in Vancouver, stupidly thinking I had ‘outgrown’ them.  And of course, Straub's Ghost Story was a memorable read.

But it’s not all horror, horror, horror in Tremblay's liner notes.  He also cited Kids in the Hall and Richard Scarry as influences.  I liked how the sisters bonded over their collaborative “reading” of Cars and Trucks and Things that Go, and how even an obsession with Goldbug and Officer Flossy could somehow be made creepy.  

Some minor flaws however.  The Last Final Girl blogger, Karen Brissette, made me cringe.  Her writing was so juvenile and eye-rollingly bad.  I thought Tremblay was trying to write in the style of a somewhat naive 20-something female, but after reading his liner notes and ‘The H Word: the Politics of Horror’, his “personal” writing style IS kinda like that!  He just amps it up for the Karen Brissette character.

Although I greatly appreciated Tremblay listing all his influences and references, as I had some cool books to add to my ever expanding reading list, the act of doing that also kind of trivialized the integrity of the fiction.  Maybe I’m a traditionalist, but for me, it took away from what should have been a self-contained universe.  Tremblay naming all his characters and basing some of their physical traits after his author friends, the novel came across more of an exercise or a self-referential game than a story that held personal meaning.  For a fun self-referential exercise, it was still an enjoyable experience.  Would definitely watch the film adaptation if it comes out.