Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Horror & supernatural fiction

A HEAD FULL OF GHOSTS

Paul Tremblay

Beverly, Massachusetts, mid-2000s, a sleepy middle-class suburb where President Taft once vacationed. Here the Barrett family lives in seeming normality, but when 14 year-old Marjorie presents symptoms of schizophrenia, it turns out that doctors can’t cure what ails her.

As family and psychologists in turn fail to stop her descent into madness, in desperation a Catholic priest is called in for an exorcism, on the premise that Marjorie is the victim of a demonic possession. And the twist: the cash-strapped Barrett family brings in a reality TV production company to film the event. 15 years on, as younger sister Meredith probingly recalls to a best-selling author that autumn when her seemingly idyllic New England home devolved into a house of horrors and her family disintegrated around her, a mind-bender of psychological horror is unleashed, raising questions about memory and reality, the cynicism of the media, and the power of science and religion to satisfyingly deal with the presence of real evil in the world. A HEAD FULL OF GHOSTS is a brilliant spin on the horror genre, marrying inventive literary flair with a terrifying storyline, in the tradition of books like Mark Z. Danielewski’s HOUSE OF LEAVES, Marisha Pessl’s NIGHT FILM, and Toby Barlow’s SHARP TEETH. Paul Tremblay is a multiple Bram Stoker Award finalist and author of the Mark Genevich novels, THE LITTLE SLEEP and NO SLEEP TILL WONDERLAND (Henry Holt). He is currently the President of the Board of Directors of the Shirley Jackson Awards, and his essays and short fiction have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Cape Cod Noir, FiveChapters.com, and numerous Year's Best anthologies. He has a master's degree in Mathematics and lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.

Available products
Book Published 2015-06-02 by Morrow

Comments

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.

Now here’s a cool idea for a reality TV show: follow a family whose daughter is possessed by a demon. That’s the set-up for this compelling horror story. The novel is stylishly written and well-conceived, with lifelike characters and an air of plausibility about it, as if all this really could happen. Tremblay, a Bram Stoker Award nominee, has delivered another quality horror novel.

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.

A genuinely scary, post-modern 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.

Dark, brilliant, and impossible to predict, Paul Tremblay's Head Full of Ghosts 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.

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. Read more...

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Brazil (Record), Bulgaria (Ednorog), Czech (Euromedia), UK (Titan), Hungary (Agave), Italy (Tre60), Poland (Papierowy), Slovakia (Ikar), Spain (Nocturna), and Turkey (Numen).

…progressively gripping and suspenseful — and (Tremblay’s) ultimate, bloodcurdling revelation is as sickeningly satisfying as it is masterful. Read more...

Literary horror novel "A Head Full of Ghosts" has landed a six-figure contract for lauded short story author Paul Tremblay. His tale of urban terror has been scheduled for a mid-2015 release by HarperCollins, with a second book also part of the deal but still very much under wraps. Tremblay has already been recognised by his peers at the Horror Writers Association, with Bram Stoker Award nominations for "The Teacher" and "There's No Light Between Floors", part of short story collection "In The Mean Time", as well as his novel "The Little Sleep".

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

Crackling with dark energy and postmodern wit Paul Tremblay’s superb novel A Head Full of Ghosts 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.

Tremblay paints a believable portrait of a family in extremis emotionally as it attempts to cope with the unthinkable ...Whether psychological or supernatural, this is a work of deviously subtle horror.