A Head Full of Ghosts E-Book

Paul Tremblay

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The lives of the Barretts, a suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia. To her parents' despair, the doctors are unable to halt Marjorie's descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help, and soon find themselves the unwitting stars of The Possession, a hit reality television show.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Outstanding Acclaim for a Head Full of Ghosts

Also by Paul Tremblay

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Part Two

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

Part Three

23

24

25

26

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Reading Group Guide Discussion Questions

The Extended Liner Notes/Dvd Extras for a Head Full of Ghosts

The H Word: The Politics of Horror

Paul Tremblay Recommends…

Also Available from Titan Books

OUTSTANDING ACCLAIM FOR A HEAD FULL OF GHOSTSNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2015 BY NPR, THE A.V. CLUB, TOR.COM, AND LITREACTOR

“A Head Full of Ghosts scared the living hell out of me, and I’m pretty hard to scare.”

STEPHEN KING

“Crackling with dark energy and postmodern wit … [this] superb novel evokes the very best in the tradition—from Shirley Jackson to Mark Z. Danielewski and Marisha Pessl—while also feeling fresh and utterly new. Deeply funny and intensely terrifying, it’s a sensory rollercoaster and not to be missed.”

MEGAN ABBOTT

“Paul Tremblay’s terrific A Head Full of Ghosts generates a haze of an altogether more serious kind: the pleasurable fog of calculated, perfectly balanced ambiguity.”

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“Tremblay paints a believable portrait of a family in extremis emotionally as it attempts to cope with the unthinkable, but at the same time he slyly suggests that in a culture where the wall between reality and acting has eroded, even the make believe might seem credible. Whether psychological or supernatural, this is a work of deviously subtle horror.”

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review)

“Brilliantly creepy.”

LIBRARY JOURNAL

“Progressively gripping and suspenseful—[Tremblay’s] ultimate, blood-curdling revelation is as sickeningly satisfying as it is masterful.”

NPR BOOKS

“Tremblay expertly ratchets up the suspense until the tension is almost at its breaking point.”

KIRKUS REVIEWS

“The novel is stylishly written and well-conceived.”

BOOKLIST

“Gripping and truly scary, this book feels of the moment in a way few thrillers do.”

B&N READS

“A Head Full of Ghosts is one of the best novels released this year…. Paul Tremblay confirms what we already knew: he’s one of the greatest horror writers today.”

THIS IS HORROR

“Loved it. Highly recommended for anyone who loves engrossing literary horror-undertones of The House of Leaves (but far more accessible) and The Exorcist, and redolent of Shirley Jackson.”

ELLEN DATLOW, editor of The Best Horror of the Year

“A Head Full of Ghosts doesn’t end just because you close the book. Some horror, it bleeds through the pages, gets onto your hands, stays with you. You’ll be thinking about this one long after you’ve read it.”

STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES, author of Mongrels

“Paul Tremblay plays fast and loose with the conventions of supernatural and psychological storytelling in this chilling ghost story for the twenty-first century. [It] is the literary lovechild of Shirley Jackson and William Peter Blatty, a novel that’s as disturbing as the worst nightmare you ever had as a kid, and as impossible to forget.”

ELIZABETH HAND, author of Generation Loss

“Paul Tremblay is an astonishingly talented writer, but even better, he’s twisted, and fun. A Head Full of Ghosts is mind-bending—scary, sad, sweet, funny, sick…. Terrifying, hilarious, smart, and satisfying.”

STEWART O’NAN, author of City of Secrets

“A genuinely scary, postmodern homage to classic horror that invokes Stanley Kubrik and Shirley Jackson in equal measure, but also manages to innovate on nearly every page. [It] is unlike any horror novel you’ve read, and yet hauntingly, frighteningly familiar.”

SARA GRAN, author of Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

“A Head Full of Ghosts is such a wonderfully wild novel. Disturbing and destabilizing, haunting and heartbreaking, this is a horror story that also plays with the history of horror tales in a way that’s simply marvelous. Paul Tremblay is an excellent writer and this book is such a fun ride.”

VICTOR LAVALLE, author of The Ballad of Black Tom

“Dark, brilliant, and impossible to predict, [this] is more than a perfect horror story. It’s a smart and savage look at American culture in all its madness, and the price girls are forced to pay by a society obsessed with spectacle and sin.”

CARA HOFFMAN, author of So Much Pretty

Also by Paul Tremblay and available from Titan Books

Disappearance at Devil’s Rock

A Head Full of GhostsPrint edition ISBN: 9781785653674E-book edition ISBN: 9781785653681

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd 144Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First Titan edition: September 201610 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 2015, 2016 by Paul Tremblay. All rights reserved.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Future of the Left for permission to reprint an excerpt from “An Idiot’s Idea of Ireland,” words and music by Future of the Left © 2013.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Charlotte Perkins Gilman for the excerpt from “The Yellow Wallpaper,” © 1892.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Bad Religion for permission to reprint an excerpt from “My Head Is Full of Ghosts,” words and music by Bad Religion © 2013.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Emma, Stewart, and Shirley

My memory, she was first to the plank, and the B-movie played in the aisle.Future of the Left, “An Idiot’s Idea of Ireland”

It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”

Do you wanna know a secret? Will you hold it close and dear? This will not be made apparent, but you and I are not alone in here.Bad Religion, “My Head Is Full of Ghosts”

PART ONE

1

“This must be so difficult for you, Meredith.”

Best-selling author Rachel Neville wears a perfect fall ensemble: dark blue hat to match her sensible knee-length skirt and a beige wool jacket with buttons as large as kitten heads. She carefully attempts to keep to the uneven walkway. The slate stones have pitched up, their edges peeking out of the ground, and they wiggle under her feet like loose baby teeth. As a child I used to tie strings of red dental floss around a wiggly tooth and leave the floss dangling there for days and days until the tooth fell out on its own. Marjorie would call me a tease and chase me around the house trying to pull the wax string, and I would scream and cry because it was fun and because I was afraid if I let her pull out one tooth she wouldn’t be able to help herself and she’d pull them all out.

Has that much time really passed since we lived here? I’m only twenty-three but if anyone asks I tell them that I’m a quarter-century-minus-two years old. I like watching people struggle with the math in their heads.

I stay off the stones and walk across the neglected front yard, grown wild and unbounded in spring and summer, now beginning to retreat in the new cold of autumn. Leaves and weedy fingers tickle my ankles and grab at my sneakers. If Marjorie were here now, maybe she’d tell me a quick story about worms, spiders, and mice crawling underneath the decaying greenery, coming to get the young woman foolishly not keeping to the safety of the pathway.

Rachel enters the house first. She has a key and I don’t. So I hang back, peel a strip of white paint off the front door, and put it in my jeans pocket. Why shouldn’t I have a souvenir? It’s a souvenir that so many others have helped themselves to by the looks of the flaking door and dandruffed front stoop.

I didn’t realize how much I missed the place. I can’t get over how gray it looks now. Was it always this gray?

I slink inside so that the front door is a whisper behind me. Standing on the scuffed hardwood of the front foyer I close my eyes to better see this initial snapshot of my prodigal return: ceilings so high I could never reach anything; cast iron radiators hiding in so many of the corners of the rooms, just itching to get steaming angry again; straight ahead is the dining room, then the kitchen, where we mustn’t ever linger, and a hallway, a clear path to the back door; to my right the living room and more hallways, spokes in wheels; below me, under the floor, the basement and its stone and mortar foundation and its cold dirt floor I can still feel between my toes. To my left is the mouth of the piano-key staircase with its white moldings and railings, and black stair treads and landings. The staircase winds its way up to the second-floor in three sets of stairs and two landings. It goes like this: six stairs up, landing, turn right, then only five stairs up to the next landing, then turn right again and six stairs up to the second-floor hallway. My favorite part was always that you were completely turned around when you reached the second floor, but oh, how I complained about that missing sixth stair in the middle.

I open my eyes. Everything is old and neglected and in some ways exactly the same. But the dust and cobwebs and cracked plaster and peeling wallpaper seem faked somehow. Passage of time as a prop to the story, the story that has been told and retold so often it has lost its meaning, even to those of us who lived through it.

Rachel sits at the far end of a long couch in the almost-empty living room. A drop cloth protects the couch’s upholstery from anyone careless enough to sit on it. Or perhaps Rachel is the one being protected, with the cloth saving her from contact with a moldy couch. Her hat settles in her lap, a fragile bird that has been bullied from its nest.

I decide to finally respond to her nonquestion, even if it has expired.

“Yes, this is difficult for me. And please, don’t call me Meredith. I prefer Merry.”

“I am sorry, Merry. Maybe our coming here is a bad idea.” Rachel stands up, her hat flutters to the floor, and she hides her hands in her jacket pockets. I wonder if she has her own paint chips, or strips of wallpaper, or some other pieces of this place’s past hidden in her pockets as well. “We could conduct the interview elsewhere, where you would be more comfortable.”

“No. Really. It’s okay. I willingly agreed to this. It’s just that I’m—”

“Nervous. I totally understand.”

“No.” I say no in my Mom’s lilty, singsong. “That’s just it. I’m the opposite of nervous. I’m almost overwhelmed by how comfortable I feel. As weird as it sounds, it’s surprisingly nice to be back home. I don’t know if that makes sense, and I normally don’t carry on like this, so maybe I am nervous. But anyway, please, sit, and I’ll join you.”

Rachel sits back down on the couch and says, “Merry, I know you don’t know me very well at all, but I promise that you can trust me. I will treat your story with the dignity and care it deserves.”

“Thank you, and I believe you will. I do,” I say and sit on the other end of the couch, which is toadstool soft. I’m thankful for the drop cloth now that I’m sitting. “It’s the story itself I don’t fully trust. It’s certainly not my story. It does not belong to me. And it’s going to be tricky navigating our way through some of the uncharted territories.” I smile, proud of the metaphor.

“Think of me as a fellow explorer, then.” Her smile, so unlike mine, is easy.

I ask, “So, how did you get it?”

“Get what, Merry?”

“The key to the front door. Did you buy the house? Not a terrible idea at all. Sure, giving tours of the infamous Barrett House didn’t quite financially work out for the previous owner, but that doesn’t mean it can’t work out now. It’d be great promotion for the book. You or your agent could start the tours again. You could spice things up with readings and book signings in the dining room. Set up a gift shop in the mud room and sell clever and ghoulish souvenirs along with the books. I could help set up scenes or live action skits in the different rooms upstairs. As—how was it worded in our contract again?—‘creative consultant,’ I could supply props and stage direction….” I lose myself in what was supposed to be a light joke, which goes on way too long. When I finally stop babbling, I hold up my hands and fit Rachel and the couch between the frames of my thumbs and fingers like an imaginary director.

Rachel laughs politely the whole time I’m talking. “Just to be clear, Merry, my dear creative consultant, I did not purchase your house.”

I am aware of how fast I am talking but I can’t seem to slow down. “That’s probably smart. No accounting for the deteriorated physical condition of the place. And what is it they say about buying houses and buying other people’s problems?”

“Per your very reasonable request that no one else accompany us today, I managed to persuade the very kind real estate agent to lend me the key and the time in the house.”

“I’m sure that’s against some sort of housing authority regulations, but your secret is safe with me.”

“Are you good at keeping secrets, Merry?”

“I’m better than some.” I pause, then add, “More often than not, they keep me,” only because it sounds simultaneously mysterious and pithy.

“Is it okay if I start recording now, Merry?”

“What, no notes? I pictured you with a pen at the ready, and a small black notebook that you keep proudly hidden away in a coat pocket. It would be full of color-coded tabs and bookmarks, marking the pages that are research bits, character sketches, and random but poignant observations about love and life.”

“Ha! That’s so not my style.” Rachel visibly relaxes and reaches across and touches my elbow. “If I can share a secret of my own: I can’t read my own scribbles. I think a large part of my motivation for becoming a writer was to stuff it in the faces of all the teachers and kids who made fun of my handwriting.” Her smile is hesitant and real, and it makes me like her a whole lot more. I also like that she doesn’t color her pepper-gray hair, that her posture is correct but not obnoxiously so, that she crosses her left foot over her right, that her ears aren’t too big for her face, and that she hasn’t yet made a remark about what a creepy, empty old house my childhood home has become.

I say, “Ah, revenge! We’ll call your future memoir The Palmer Method Must Die! and you’ll send copies to your confused and long since retired former teachers, each copy illegibly signed in red, of course.”

Rachel opens her jacket and pulls out her smartphone.

I slowly bend to the floor and pick up her blue hat. After politely brushing dust from the brim I place it on top of my head with a flourish. It’s too small.

“Ta-dah!”

“You look better in it than I do.”

“Do you really think so?”

Rachel smiles again. This one I can’t quite read. Her fingers tap and flash across the touch screen of her phone and a bleep fills the empty space of the living room. It’s a terrible sound; cold, final, irrevocable.

She says, “Why don’t you start by telling me about Marjorie and what she was like before everything happened.”

I take her hat off and twirl it around. The centrifugal force of the rotations will either keep the hat on my finger or send it flying across the room. If it flies off, I wonder where in the whole wide house it will land.

I say, “My Marjorie—” And then I pause because I don’t know how to explain to her that my older sister hasn’t aged at all in fifteen-plus years and there never was a before everything happened.

2

THE LAST FINAL GIRL

Yeah, it’s just a BLOG! (How retro!) Or is THE LAST FINAL GIRL the greatest blog ever!?!? Exploring all things horror and horrific. Books! Comics! Video games! TV! Movies! High school! From the gooey gory midnight show cheese to the highfalutin art-house highbrow. Beware of spoilers. I WILL SPOIL YOU!!!!!

BIO: Karen BrissetteMonday, November, 14, 20—The Possession, Fifteen Years Later: Episode 1 (Part 1)

Yes, I know, it’s hard to believe that everyone’s favorite (well, my favorite) reality TV crash ’n burn The Possession originally aired fifteen years ago. Damn, fifteen years ago, right? Oh those heady days of NSA surveillance, torrent, crowdfunding, and pre-collapse economy!

You’re going to need a bigger boat for my grand deconstruction of the six-episode series. There’s so much to talk about. I could write a dissertation on the pilot alone. I can’t stand it anymore! You can’t stand it anymore! Karen, stop teasing usssssss!!!!

Insert authorial voice here: As late as the mid-2000s a midseason replacement in the fall/holiday season meant the show was being dumped. But with the success of Duck Dynasty and many other cable networks’ so-called “redneck reality” TV shows, any time slot could be the time for a surprise hit reality show.

(aside: these “redneck reality”—a bourgeois term if there ever was one—shows filled the lack of blue-collar sitcoms or dramas … remember Green Acres or The Dukes of Hazzard, nah, me either)

The Discovery Channel bet big on The Possession, though at first glance it didn’t exactly fit the redneck mold. The show was set (yes, I’m using the word set as I’m treating the show like fiction, and that’s because it was, like all the other reality TV, fiction. Duh.) in the well-to-do suburb Beverly, Massachusetts. Too bad the Barrett family didn’t conveniently live in the town next door, Salem, where, you know, they burned all them witches back in ye olde days.

I hereby request the sequel be made and set in Salem, please! I kid, but they might as well have set The Possession in a town that infamously tortured “improper” young women to death, right? But I digress … So, yeah, at first glance, the show had no rednecks, no backwaters, no ponds with snapping turtles, no down-home, folksy wisdom, or dudes in giant beards and overalls. The Barretts were a stereotypically middle-class family at a time when the middle class was rapidly disappearing. Their fading middle-classness was a huge part of the show’s appeal to blue-collar folks and the down-and-outers. So many Americans thought and continue to think they’re middle class even when they’re not, and they are desperate to believe in the middle class and the values of bourgeois capitalism.

So here came this 1980s sitcom-esque family (think Family Ties, Who’s the Boss?, Growing Pains) who were under siege from outside forces (both real and fictional), and where The Possession nailed that blue-collar sweet spot was with John Barrett, an unemployed father in his early forties. The family’s financial situation, like so many other folks, was in the shitter, shall we say. Barrett had worked for the toy manufacturer Barter Brothers for nineteen years but was laid off after Hasbro bought out the company and closed down the eighty-year-old factory in Salem. (Salem again! Where are all the witches at?) John wasn’t college educated and had worked at the factory since he was nineteen, starting out on the assembly lines, then working his way up through the place, climbing that toy ladder until he was finally in charge of the mail room. He’d received thirty-eight weeks of severance pay for his double-decade of servitude, which he’d managed to stretch out into a year and a half of living wage. There was only so much stretching the Barretts could do to maintain two daughters and a big house and real estate tax bill and all the hope and promise and yearning that comes with the middle-class lifestyle.

The pilot episode opens with John’s tale of woe. What a brilliant choice by the writers/producers/show-sters! Opening with one of the many supposed possession-reenactments would’ve been too cliché, and frankly, too goofy. Instead they gave us grainy black-and-white photos of John’s old factory in its days of prosperity, photos of the workers inside happily making their foam and rubber toys. Then they cut to a montage with the images flickering by almost subliminally quick: DC politicians, angry Occupy Wall Street protestors, Tea-Party rallies, unemployment charts and graphs, chaotic courtrooms, ranting talking heads, crying people filing out of the Barter Brothers factory. Within the first minute of the series, we’d already witnessed the new and all-too-familiar American economic tragedy. The show established a sense of gravity, along with an air of unease by using only realism and by first introducing John Barrett: the new and neutered postmillennial male; a living symbol of the patriarchal breakdown of society and, gosh darn it, he symbolized it well, didn’t he?

Ugh, I didn’t intend to introduce this series of blog posts about THE series with politics. I promise I’ll get to the fun gory horror stuff eventually, but you have to indulge me first … BECAUSE KAREN SAYS SO!!!

If The Possession was going to emulate so many of the archconservative possession movies and horror movies that had come before it, then it was going to do so while standing on those sagging shoulders of the man of the house. The message was already clear. Daddy Barrett was out of a job and consequently the family and society as a whole was in full decay mode. Poor Mom, Sarah Barrett (stalwart bank teller), only gets a brief background check in the opening segment. Her being the sole breadwinner in the family isn’t mentioned until later in the pilot when she offhandedly mentions her job during one of the confessional (see what they did there????) interviews. Sarah is barely a prop in the opening as we see a montage of wedding photos and pictures of the two daughters, Merry and Marjorie.

In the photos everyone is smiling and happy, but ominous music plays in the background … (dun, dun, DUN!)

3

I tell Rachel that there is no starting point or ground zero for what happened to Marjorie and our family.

If there was, the eight-year-old me was not aware of it, and the almost quarter-century-old me cannot find it with the supposedly clear lens of hindsight. Worse, my memories mix up with my nightmares, with extrapolation, with skewed oral histories from my grandparents and aunts and uncles, and with all the urban legends and lies propagated within the media, pop culture, and the near continuous stream of websites/blogs/YouTube channels devoted to the show (and I have to confess to reading way more online stuff than I should). So all of it hopelessly jumbles up what I knew and what I know now.

In a way, my personal history not being my own, being literally and figuratively haunted by outside forces, is almost as horrible as what actually happened. Almost.

Let me give you a small example before we really start.

When I was four my parents attended two church-sponsored Marriage Encounter weekends. I’ve learned from second-third-fourth-hand accounts that Dad insisted they go with the hopes of getting them through a rough patch in their marriage and to rediscover God in their relationship and lives. Mom, at the time, was no longer Catholic or practicing any religion at all and was very much against the idea, but she still went. Why she went is subject to total speculation as she never told me or anyone else why. That I’m talking about it now would totally embarrass her. The first weekend went well enough with their A-frame cabin, walks in the woods, their group discussions, and dialogue drills; each couple would take turns writing down and then sharing their answers to questions concerning their marriage, with those questions framed within the context of some biblical lesson or text. Apparently the second weekend didn’t go so hot, with Mom walking out on Marriage Encounter and Dad when he reportedly stood before the entire gathering and quoted an Old Testament verse about the wife having to submit herself to the husband.

Now, it’s certainly possible that story about Mom’s weekend walkout is an exaggeration based on a couple of facts: My parents did leave the second weekend early and ended up staying a night in a Connecticut casino; while Dad famously found religion again when we were older, he (and we) did not attend church, Catholic or other, for many years prior to the attempted exorcism. I mention these facts in the interest of accuracy and context, and to point out that it’s possible his quoting the Bible didn’t actually happen even if enough people believe it did.

But I am not saying it isn’t probable that Dad quoted the offending verse at Mom, as it sounds totally like something he’d do. The rest of that particular story is easy to imagine: Mom storming away from the retreat cabin, Dad running to catch up with her, begging for forgiveness and apologizing profusely, and then to make it up to her, taking her to the casino.

Regardless, what I remember of those Marriage Encounter weekends is only that my parents went away with the promise that they’d be back soon. Away was the only word the four-year-old me remembered. I had no concept of distance or time. Only that they were away, which sounded so weirdly menacing in an Aesop’s Fables way. I was convinced they went away because they were sick of my eating pasta without spaghetti sauce. Dad had always grumbled about his not believing that I didn’t like the sauce while he added butter and pepper to my macaroni elbows (my preferred pasta shape). While they were away my dad’s younger sister, Auntie Erin, babysat Marjorie and me. Marjorie was fine but I was too scared and freaked out to keep to my normal sleep routine. I built a meticulous fortress of stuffed animals around my head while Auntie Erin sang me song after song after song. What song didn’t really matter, according to my aunt, as long as it was something I’d heard on the radio.

Okay, I promise I will generally not footnote all the sources (conflicting or otherwise) of my own story. Here in the pre-beginning, I only wanted to demonstrate how tricky this is and how tricky this could get.

To be honest, and all the external influences aside, there are some parts of this that I remember in great, terrible detail, so much so I fear getting lost in the labyrinth of memory. There are other parts of this that remain as unclear and unknowable as someone else’s mind, and I fear that in my head I’ve likely conflated and compressed timelines and events.

So, anyway, keeping all that in mind, let’s begin again.

What I’m not so delicately saying with this preamble is that I’m trying my best to find a place to start

Although, I guess I already have started, haven’t I?

4

I had a playhouse made out of cardboard in the middle of my bedroom. It was white with black outlines of a slate roof and there were happy flower boxes illustrated below the shuttered windows. A stumpy, brick chimney was on top, way too small for Santa, not that I believed in Santa at that age, but I pretended to for the benefit of others.