Book Club Guide

A Head Full of Ghosts

by Paul Tremblay · 2015 · Horror

Key themes

Belief, performance and the question of what is real
How the internet and media consume suffering for entertainment
Possession — religious, psychological and familial

About this book

A family's possession ordeal becomes a reality show; clever modern horror that keeps you guessing.

Published in 2015, A Head Full of Ghosts won the Bram Stoker Award and is considered one of the most significant horror novels of recent years. Stephen King called it 'one of the most frightening novels I've read in decades.'

Discussion questions

Marjorie's possession is never definitively explained — we are left unsure whether it is supernatural, psychiatric or performed. How does this ambiguity function — and what is the novel saying about the impossibility of knowing?
The blog posts from a horror aficionado are interspersed throughout. How does this internet reader's perspective change the reader's own relationship to what they are witnessing?
The reality television element turns a family's crisis into entertainment. What is Tremblay saying about our consumption of other people's suffering — and does the novel implicate the reader?
Merry is an eight-year-old narrator looking back. What does her perspective — incomplete, partial, distorted — allow the novel to do that an adult narrator could not?
The novel explicitly references Shirley Jackson and William Peter Blatty. How does this self-consciousness about its genre serve or undercut the horror?