Book Review: A Head Full of Ghosts

Earlier this year Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts won the Bram Stoker award for Best Novel, a fact that added it immediately to my reading list. Having just finished it, I'm happy to say this continues the trend of excellent horror novels I've read this year, following works by Stephen King, Joe Hill, Justin Cronin and Grady Hendrix.

Like Hendrix's My Best Friend's Exorcism, Tremblay's work deals with the possession of a young girl, but then moves into a Rashomon-like narrative, following the story of 14-year-old Marjorie Barrett, told from the point of view of her sister Meredith at age twenty-three (talking with an investigator), age eight (when the possession occurred), and from the point of view of a young blogger obsessed with Possessed, a reality show that ran for six episodes and focused on the events at the time.

The novel looks deeply at the life of a troubled family, how reality TV (and fame associated with it) is not a solution but instead something worse for the family, and how in many ways these two young girls are forced to perform to the camera, making better TV, but at an incredibly steep cost.

As horror the book worked incredibly well, comparing it to Hendrix's work, which in many ways is a love-letter to childhood friendships, A Head Full of Ghosts ends up leading you to some very dark places, places that move from a sense of investigation to one of exploitation and eventually horror. In the end I was incredibly impressed with the novel and will likely add it to my own collection.

A really good read.

Why I Love Horror: The Video Station Years

I’ve been working at a new office for the last couple of weeks, and today when the cleaning guy came in and did the floors in our file room I was suddenly transported to my first real job – swing shift at my local video store (although I didn't work at the one pictured above - it was pretty similar).

I had had plenty of jobs before, but the Video Station was my first job as a husband and a father. I started by working the swing shift, which is to say Midnight to 8:00am on Tuesdays and Wednesdays followed by an 8:00am to 4:00pm shift on Thursdays and Fridays. The hours were terrible but the pay wasn't bad.

My evening shifts included cleaning the entire store (hence my smell-induced memory this morning) and the luxury of watching whatever kind of movie I liked after midnight (not including the backroom stuff obviously).

This meant once my cleaning was done (about an hour of work), I had six hours a night, twice a week, to watch all the movies I wanted (the last hour was spent doing prep work for the day shift), and believe me, with two young kids in the house, I checked out an awful lot of horror.

Like I mentioned in my first post about my love of horror, I watched a lot of slasher flicks as a young kid (for anyone else who did, I strongly recommend the documentary Going to Pieces, as it looks at the subgenre and puts the films into a context – which I love), but it was in my twenties working as a video store employee that I began to work my way through the genre, alphabetically, based on the movies that weren’t rented out that night.

Long story short – I saw a lot of crap. But for every ten or eleven films that had only a few minutes of cleverness in them, I saw some amazing films, films that showed me exactly how well any genre can work if everyone is doing their job correctly.

Case in point – The Exorcist (pictured right). I saw this film the first time when I was still in Elementary, and you know what? It was pretty boring, the shocks were too far apart for my taste, and I didn’t get a lot of it. I next saw it around the age of seventeen, the demonic aspect of the film hit me a lot closer to home, and I could appreciate the technical work that went into the film. As a young father at the Video Station however, the film terrified me, I literally could not get the creep factor of this film out of my head for months. Not the demonic stuff, not the pea soup, but specifically the idea that something is wrong with your kid and no one can help, something so bad that eventually you give up on the doctors and head to a priest. That was some scary stuff indeed.

I worked at the Video Station for a few years, and by the time I was done I had seen a lot of older movies (they didn’t get rented as often), had developed a love of western novels (which I posted about here) and could honestly say I was definitely no longer just a guy who liked horror movies, but had become an enthusiast of the genre.

Things I've Noticed #5: Age Appropriate Materials

Whenever you look up a top ten list of horror movies, you are bound to come across The Exorcist, it's the horror equivalent of Madonna on a top ten pop music list of the '80s. It joins Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre as horror movies everyone has to see, like Star Wars and 2001 are to SF fans.

So as a die-hard horror fan I have seen this movie a lot, and let me tell you, the first time I saw it (age 12) my opinion was this:

BORING! By the time I got to the end I was definitely checking out a book instead of watching the film. (Picutred above - and yes I was reading a Grover book at age 12 - that book is AWESOME! and for the record, more suspenseful to my 12-year-old self than The Exorcist anyday) I mean, you spend most of the movie watching a mom wander around Washington D.C. talking to people, you don't even get to the devil stuff practically until the end and it's over pretty fast.

At age 16 I saw it again, and my opinion changed - the girl is pretty scary and I was beginning to be able to appreciate camera angles and the strange imagery throughout the film.

As a parent of 2 at age 20, I watched the movie again and you know what (pictured left) This is one of the scariest movies ever. The stuff with the mom finally clicked with me - to have a child so sick that you end up going back and forth between doctors and therapists, who give you no hope, and end up going to priest for help (the mom is a capital-A Atheist) suddenly became very relatable to me.

Here's my theory, certain books and movies work best at a certain age. The Exorcist doesn't work for kids, because the scary stuff is aimed at parents. You get more out of it when you can relate with the main character (the mom). This happens with books too, I first read Lord of the Rings when I was in grade 5 - but to be honest, I mean I first read Fellowship in Grade 5 and then all the Sam and Frodo bits of the next two books. I simply didn't have the patience to wade through all the rest of the book at that age.

Now, does this mean I think kids shouldn't even give The Exorcist a try? Of course not, but what I do think is that certain books and movies benefit from being revisited. Earlier this week I talked about my first impression of The Terminator (at age 10), At first it was scary, when I re-watched it in Junior High it was awesome, and only last year (age 32) did I see the Christ story parallels and the fact that every machine in 1984 is also trying to stop Sarah Conner.

So we can view it one of two ways - either certain books are aimed at certain audiences, and therefore resonate better with them. or (and my personal favourite) I may be getting smarter...