The 2 best pieces of media I've consumed so far in 2016 both kinda sorta maybe involved The Devil. Robert Eggars film The Witch I have written about and blathered about endlessly. I do so out of love. Love for the film and love for you because I want you to see good stuff. It hits Blu Ray and DVD on May 17th so soon there will be no more excuses.
The other is a book I read back in January and planned to write about. I hadn't started my blog back up at the time but I knew I would need to talk about it. It's an extraordinary psychological horror novel called A HEAD FULL OF GHOSTS, by Paul Tremblay.
I first read about the book when seeing on The Onion A/V Club year-end Best Of list. Jason Heller praised the book comparing it to other demonic possession books such as The Exorcist (Duh!). But he made sure to point out that it's not a rote imitation. It takes it's own very unique route through a possession story and in doing so has an impact that is all it's own.
The basic plot is as follows. Merry Barrett is 23, haunted and troubled. She is working with an author, another young woman, about a time in Merry's childhood where her older sister, Marjorie, appeared to have psychological problems. Their father believed she was possessed by a demon. Her alcoholic mother did not, but she agreed to a television network to turn the story into a reality TV drama.
The plot is told through a series of flashbacks, latter day retrospective blog entries about the reality TV show (which only lasted 6 episodes, for reasons best left to the reader to discover), and a few dialogue-based scenes between Merry and the books author, named Rachel.
It's quite a balancing act and a tricky book. The blog entries alert us to subterfuges taking place, particularly by television producers and priests involved in the program. They also work as a reflexive critique of the horror genre itself, and the techniques used in creating horror fiction. The first-person backstory also gets wobbly after an admission by Marjorie reveals possible underhandedness.
All of this adds up to give us a portrait of a horribly broken family, fracture by lies, greed and faith. Each family member seems to have a secret self but we don't know if we're seeing the genuine one at any given time. All of the characters are untrustworthy, and the story flowers into a damning depiction of American attitudes towards religion, family and especially mental illness.
But if only it were that simple. Early scenes of Marjorie's behavior are disturbing and sinister, as she psychologically tortures her younger sister. But even those could be debunked (and are by blog entries) if things didn't take such an extreme turn for the worse towards the very end. The event that ends the backstory is as disturbing and troubling as it gets, and puts a punctuation mark a fractured family.
The book closes with perhaps it's most well written section, one that leaves the reader cold and wondering if we've heard even one word of truth from anybody. The writing is very subtle and clever. It doesn't pull any rugs out, really, or resort to cheap twists, but there is the suggestion all we now know is not all that need be known. I closed the book satisfied even though I knew one secret was just beyond my grasp. It left me wanting more.
My first impression of the book was that it was a remarkable critique of how we view people with mental illness. And it works that way. Sick people are viewed as monsters, as rejects, as entertainment. But more so I find it's a novel about the conversation between cultural forces that judge before the facts are available. The TV show. The blog. The impending novel. The full facts of this story can never be known, even while it was in progress.Yet we can't handle the unsolvable. We obsess over it. Like that final page in the book, some things will just forever remain out of reach.
I must read this!
ReplyDelete