I've been wanting to update this blog more, but I've been busy working on my book and focused all of my writing time to that. But, as I wind down on my first draft, I would like to pick this back up and start adding more. I've got a pile of short stories that I think would be great to add here and this post could be a start of a book review/writing feature, where I review the book but focus on the writing of it and maybe what I learned from it.
So here we go...
A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay is a modern day horror novel that plays out more like a family drama with some *maybe* horror moments. The horror came from the family dynamics and how each member of the family treats the youngest daughter. I found it disturbing mainly because I am a father of two small girls and reading what happens to the daughters hit a nerve. I wanted to scream out at the dad for his treatment of the younger of the two, who is the narrator of the story. And the older daughter fed the little girl enough creepy stories and lies that I wanted to reach out and hug the girl. I couldn't help but see my daughters in the story, which might be a bit messed up if you have already read the story.
I'm trying to not spoil the story too much. I think it is worth your time to check it out. The writing is great and it had enough of a hook to keep me flipping the pages. However, for me it just didn't hit the spot that it needed to. Tremblay took you to the edge and then quickly backed away. As a horror fan I think you should go all out, don't skimp back and act like this story needs to take place in the real world. If you want to keep it in the real world fine, but you can add some magic to it to keep it planted in horror. Don't call it horror and then deliver a good family drama. There is a great concept in having a demon possession take place in this day, we could explore the social media aspect, the TV aspect, and dig deeper in what it means for a connected world like this.
We do get some of that in this book. The main drive of the narrative is the reality TV show that is used to show the exorcism and give the family an income after the father has been unemployed. There is also blog dissecting the reality TV show fifteen years after the show has been aired. Tremblay uses the blog to point out the issues with the show, and how it was set up as a fiction to make the possession seem creepier than it actually was. He dissects the TV show in what seems to be an attempt to make fun of those types of shows, you see how the producers set up rooms to make them seem scarier and how the cameraman gets in the way of the family to get a shot. For me, that feels real. I can totally see a show editing and intruding in a situation to make a better show. The blog comments on the other side of the show, what it looks like as a watcher. It comments on again the quick edits and the use of effects to make it more of a horror TV show than a reality show. It is a nice way as the author to have the TV show in the story.
The other drive of the story is an author writing a book about the show and is interviewing the youngest daughter, again fifteen years after the show. Each of these scenes take place at the beginning of a section of the book. It is where Tremblay reveals big plot points of the story. Yet each of these reveals are thrown in and passed by so fast that we don't get to savor it. I understand what he is doing, it's a way to see the little girl in the present day and how she has *sorta* come to terms with what happened. The author of the book acts as a mother/investigator into the family. I think the revealing of the plot points were used because you could probably skip over those parts and not feel like the story is missing anything. It doesn't give you anything to work with on a horror level until maybe at the end(again there is a random point that maybe could be considered scary, but you were on the last page and it fell flat).
So, Tremblay does some of what I was asking for. And yes, I understand that the narrator is an eight-year-old girl so you aren't going to see everything. You are seeing it through her eyes. As a writer I can understand that you are hiding it, letting the reader fill in the blanks. But, since you are giving us two sides of the story, you could give us a third. Maybe make a blog that is from one of the producers? Something like that. There is too much hinted at that doesn't pay off. I appreciate the openness of it, but it felt like there were too many threads left for us to pull at. And then others that we really didn't need.
I think some of the plot points(again, I'm trying not to spoil anything) could have been used as more of a section ending, or landed it at a point where you as the reader are shocked. Instead, a couple of the big reveals are tossed away as if it should have been something we had seen coming. It would have been like in Star Wars if Darth Vader just randomly revealed he was Luke's father and just kept on going. It would have ruined that moment. I think Tremblay could have gotten the same impact if he just timed out his reveal a little differently. It was something that totally shocked me when I found out, but it was stuck in the middle of a paragraph in the middle of a chapter that if I wasn't paying attention I could have missed it.
I don't know why that bothered me so much. But, it did. Either Tremblay is trying something new with just running ahead without stopping at the stop sign at the exit, or he didn't want it to be as important as it was. I don't know. I guess what I can take away from that is that I won't do that in my stories. Or maybe I should, it got me all worked about it and made me dust off the blog to talk about it. It could be a good way to get some attention. And maybe it is something like real life. Real life doesn't stop when a big event happens, time just keeps on rolling. But, this is a horror story, it isn't real life. You can linger on your big event and roll around in it a little bit, let it seep into your pores until your skin can't breathe any more. Stretch out in that room and stick the reader's face into each dusty spider-webbed corner. When they are laying in their bed reading your book, give them the time to wonder if something is crawling up their sheets or coming down from the ceiling. If you breeze past the room with the murderous clown, they might see that bit of color in a drab room, and fill in the spaces of why that clown is there; but if you stop and give the clown a chance to see the reader and walk up to the threshold, the reader's night of sleep is going to be ruined because the clown saw them and looked into their eyes. Put their imagination onto that cart and you control the path, instead of just hinting at where they should go.
Anyway, it is a really good summer book. I didn't want to put it down. And I'm not saying it was ineffective, I clearly was affected by the family and the daughters. I just think there could have been a little bit more to make the horror part of the story pop more than it being a family drama that had horror elements.
