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Lädt ... A Head Full of Ghosts: A Novel (2015. Auflage)von Paul Tremblay (Autor)
Werk-InformationenA Head Full of Ghosts von Paul Tremblay
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Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. DNF @ 25%. This is just not doing it for me right now. There is much to say about this novel, for the good and the bad. Interesting story, a bit clumsily developed, with pointless circonvolutions (what is the insistence on Merry's use of signs in one of the final chapters for?? It does not add anything...) and an "ambiguous" final twist that left me totally, jaw-dropping disappointed. It's a pity, because there is some gold in the novel, nearly always betrayed in the realisation. For example, the treatment of the unreliable narrator as potentially disturbed adult recalling her eight-year-old self's memories is fairly good for a while, until the writer seems forgetting about the double layer of treacherous memories and plunges into a child's narrative. A good one, ok, but it's not what we traded in for, when we suspended incredulity about the adult character recalling her (slippery) past. The final chapters are terrifying, except that, as I anticipated, the very last lines wreck it all with a Dr Caligari trick (see the final scene of the movie, but beware, this is a half-spoiler). I can't recall any moment in the narrative that prepared this plot twist, unless we accept that the unreliable one is not the narrator, but the writer! And we WILL NOT accept it, will we? Much to the writer's honour, there is some great insight about the shifty nature of mental illness, the misoginist violence in-built into normalisation rituals and catholic symbolism, and the cultural and psychological vacuum and desperation in which reality TV, or trash TV in general, find their way into people's lives. I did not have to push my suspension of disbelief too far to believe that this "normal" family with an unoccupied father on the verge of dropping into religious mania had ended up acting in a monstrous exorcism reality show, in order to survive economically their elder daughter's psychiatric care. Well done. It's a pity that many interesting reflections were delivered pedantically through the means of a nauseating horror-zine blog commenting on the now-vintage reality show. It was supposed to leave us with the doubt that all the experience was a fake, I suppose. I do suppose, because the blog chapters totally failed at whatever they were aimed, unless they were precisely aimed at annoying the reader. Maybe part of this disgust, I have to admit, is due to the audiobook reader's treatment of the blog chapters. Which brings me to the review of the audiobook quality: folks, don't do that to yourselves. The narrator spoiled the book for me. She even read male voices with, oh boy, fake male voices. The protagonist's father sounds as a mix of Homer Simpson and Goofy. 1 star to the audiobook. All in all, a flawed book worth reading, as many I encountered lately. Just stay away from the audiobook read by Joy Osmansky. I’ve read his narcoleptic detective books and enjoyed them but this was a cut above. Does exactly what the best horror books do, by exposing some of the darkness in the real world, while at the same time it was full of little Easter eggs for devoted horror fans. Well done… and more than a bit disturbing I can't recall how I came across this, but I'm glad I did. It's such a good take on the possession or mental illness trope of horror fiction. It's told from the point of view of the younger sister of the victim, about 15 years after the incident. What she remembers, and how it may have been affected by the family's participation in a TV show at the time is front and centre all the time. Did it really happen thus way or is she conflating the memory with something she's since read? It's definitely a page-turner and difficult to stick with in places,but so worth it when you get to the end. Highly recommended.
Perhaps the most confronting thing about A Head Full of Ghosts is how it interrogates the fine line between what we think of as possession and what is an outward display of severe mental illness. It’s ambiguous which is the case here, but the predatory nature of involving a reality TV show, as well as everyone making Marjorie’s illness about themselves, shows a far more realistic and unsettling horror than just spinning heads.... A Head Full of Ghosts starts a little slow, and the perspective of an eight-year-old may take a little bit to get used to, but if you pick up this book, stick with it. Tremblay’s novel is a slow boil towards a tragic end, but so much of the horror lies in the journey along the way, not just a climactic jump scare. In many ways, it feels like every possession story in the 20th century has led up to this book. Imagine a literary horror novel that riffs on one of the best and creepiest short stories out there, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper: “It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!” Then throw in elements of every tale of possession you’ve read or seen, from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House to William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, and you’ll end up with Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, one of the most frightening books I’ve read this, or any, year....Despite the skill with which Tremblay wields his demons, real or otherwise, whether or not Marjorie is actually possessed ends up not being the point of A Head Full of Ghosts. None of our narrators here, adult or child Merry (a brilliantly-realised eight-year-old girl), or the blogger, who has secrets of her own, are remotely reliable, and Tremblay is elegantly, carefully ambiguous about the situation. But wherever it comes from, there’s real evil at the heart of this book – and just in time for Halloween. ...it smartly, viscerally exposes the way mass media, the Internet and pop culture have transformed our experience of that primal human impulse, horror.... Tremblay ambitiously structures the story as a pingponging narrative that coalesces into an unsettling conversation about the truth, or what the various characters suspect is the truth.... In essence, A Head Full of Ghosts is a book about a book about a TV show about a real-life event whose facts have never been fully established, with running meta-commentary by a blog that bears its own secret agenda. On top of that, it's told by an eyewitness whose reliability is just as problematic. 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. When a teenager exhibits early signs of schizophrenia, her parents turn not to traditional psychiatry but to a Catholic priest determined to drive out demons and a sleazy reality TV show eager to get the whole fiasco on tape.... As the adult Merry's memories clash with the televised version of events leading up to the climactic final episode of The Possession—it's not spoiling too much to say that everything that could go wrong does—readers will begin to question if anyone in the house is truly sane. Tremblay expertly ratchets up the suspense until the tension is almost at its breaking point. Gehört zu VerlagsreihenAuszeichnungenPrestigeträchtige AuswahlenBemerkenswerte Listen
Fiction.
Horror.
Thriller.
HTML: WINNER OF THE 2015 BRAM STOKER AWARD FOR SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN A NOVEL 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 normal 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 stop 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. Father Wanderly suggests an exorcism; he believes the vulnerable teenager is the victim of demonic possession. He also contacts a production company that is eager to document the Barretts' plight. With John, Marjorie's father, out of work for more than a year and the medical bills looming, the family agrees to be filmed, 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 bestselling writer interviews Marjorie's younger sister, Merry. As she recalls those long ago events that took place when she was just eight years old, long-buried secrets and painful memories that clash with what was broadcast on television begin to surface??and a mind-bending tale of psychological horror is unleashed, raising vexing questions about memory and reality, science and religion, and the very nature of evil. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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