Reviews with content warning for Gore - A Head Full of Ghosts

“Maybe I'm just a lost, confused kid, scared of what's happening to me, to my family, to the world, and I hate school and I have no friends, and I spend my days sleeping with my iPod cranked up as loud as it'll go, trying not to go completely crazy, and with all that time alone I'm looking shit up on the Internet, looking up the same stuff over and over, and I memorize it all because I'm wicked smart, because I have to fill my head with something other than the ghosts.”

A Head Full of Ghosts is a novel that turns the typical possession story on it’s head. The audience follows Merry, the youngest daughter of the Barrett family, now an adult, as she recounts the bizarre happenings of her childhood in unreliable detail.

The story is engaging and tense throughout. It doesn’t have the typical ultra-fast pace that most possession stories have, though it compensates through it’s extra layer of mystery. The reader is meant to believe something “more” is going on with the characters ; one isn’t ever able to fully dismiss the possibility Marjorie is possessed, but one can’t really believe it either. The characters are at the same time deep and shallow, constrained to archetypes yet clearly immensely flawed. The horror, though never truly “horrific,” is successfully unsettling and upsetting. The format of the story is also rather unique and engaging, with multiple perspectives all from one narrator.

That being said, the book isn’t without flaws. There’s quite a bit of clunky writing, sentences that go on for much too long, separated by too many commas all in a way that may-be-intentional-for-the-character-but-is-still-offputting-sometimes, and it makes the reader either scurry over words or repeat sentences that flow in a too-strange way (see what I did there?). The writing isn’t bad ; it’s certainly engaging and meant to fit the off-beat character, but it is rather messy at points. There is also a huge amount of horror references in the book. References aren’t inherently an issue, and clearly the immensity of them is intentional, though it’s still distracting from the main narrative. The writing is redundant at points, with parts of the plot being repeated multiple times. The moments of redundancy and the long droning sentences make for many “please get to the point”s.

Aside from it’s flaws, the book is great! It’s entertaining and fun for any horror fan. The themes are interesting and I’ll be thinking about what “really happened” and deconstructing Merry as a character in my head for awhile. I recommend it!

Content Warnings