A Head Full of Ghosts

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About this listen

A chilling thriller that brilliantly blends psychological suspense and supernatural horror, reminiscent of Stephen King's The Shining, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist.

The lives of the Barretts, a suburban New England family, are torn apart when 14-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. When events in the Barrett household explode in tragedy, the show and the shocking incidents it captures become the stuff of urban legend. Fifteen years later a best-selling writer interviews Marjorie's younger sister, Merry. As she recalls the terrifying events that took place when she was just eight years old, long-buried secrets and painful memories begin to surface, and a mind-bending tale of psychological horror is unleashed.

Paul TremblayJoy OsmanskiBolinda Publishing Pty Ltd

Ghosts

Horror

Suspense

Thriller & Suspense

Haunted

Scary

Exciting

Fiction

Mental Health

Ghosts Horror Suspense Thriller & Suspense Haunted Scary Exciting Fiction Mental Health

Critic reviews

" A Head Full of Ghosts scared the living hell out of me, and I'm pretty hard to scare." (Stephen King, best-selling author)
"Terrific.... Generates a haze of an altogether more serious kind: the pleasurable fog of calculated, perfectly balanced ambiguity." ( The New York Times Book Review)

Most relevant

I’ll get straight to the point, I didn’t like this book. It wasn’t entirely the fault of the story, although I did find that to be lacklustre with very little deviation from the well trodden ‘is she possessed or just mad’ trope that has been done so much better in other books. I also hate when the best part of the story unfolds in the last third of the book, especially when you’ve sat though hours of descriptions of people or places, of lonely football games and sun-rooms, I understand the need to set the scene but too much of the story was wasted on relatively little and the ‘meat’, the part of the book I enjoyed the most, the truly tragic end seemed rushed and almost glossed over.
The other thing that put me off was the narration. She did the female voices well, with only subtle changes between mum and Marjorie being enough to tell them apart, but the male voices were distracting, her mock deepened voice was off-putting and took me out of the story and after a while became irritating and almost comical. I also saw little relation between young Merry and older Merry, which was surprising considering all she’d been through.
Maybe I’m just too thick to get it. Make your own mind up.