Penpal is constructed as a series of episodic recollections from different points in the narrator’s childhood and adolescence, and focuses a lot on the unreliability of memory and a childhood perspective that doesn’t quite appreciate the enormity of what’s happening at the moment. Basically, we do a lot of things as kids that it’s only years later we realize were really dangerous, or maybe we consider a specific person’s behavior and realize what seemed innocuous as children really wasn’t, and this book takes that idea and explores it to startling effect. The narrator got hurt when was a kid, he had a best friend with whom he lost touch, a teen romance nipped in the bud, and a school project to find penpals by sending out balloons with notes attached ended up having far-reaching consequences for him and people around him. It creates a tension between the innocence of the narrator’s childhood recollections and our adult understanding of the implications of the events he’s recounting, and as the book moves on, things get worse and worse as the narrator, now an adult, come to a reckoning with his mother about what happened all those years ago.
It hinges a lot on small details and reveals, and does so with sharp effectiveness - it’s one of the few books I’ve ever read that elicited gasps from me. It’s had its film rights optioned, and I think that if someone like Mike Flanagan - someone who knows how to get the most out of small details and understands people as people, not just plot objects - got hold of it, it would make one hell of a horror film.
It’s easy for possession narratives to collapse into cliché, into the same riff on The Exorcist that we keep seeing in one form or another. But A Head Full Of Ghosts pulls off a really nice balancing act. It’s the story of one blue-collar family in Massachusetts, whose lives are upended when their oldest daughter begins acting very, very strangely. It’s told from the perspective of her younger sister, and bounces back and forth in time, told in a quasi-epistolary fashion via modern-day interview transcripts and blog entries, the past represented by diary entries and other sources of information as the family’s economic and emotional situations collapse, leading them to accept help from a local priest who, in turn, thinks that their story would make an excellent reality television show. Which sounds like it’s being set up as some kind of blunt satire of show business and what people will do for fame (which would be boring, in my opinion), but it’s not - it’s an account of the destruction of this family’s lives in the wake of a force that might (or might not) be supernatural.
The plotting uses periodic twists to maintain a sense of unease, alongside some sparingly used but highly effective imagery to illustrate the older daughter’s deterioration. The family themselves sometimes threaten to fall into caricature, but the cruelty that an older sister can visit on an utterly worshipful and trusting younger sister is acutely and devastatingly observed.
The film version is in pre-production, directed by Oz Perkins, whose I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House struck me as a stylishly mixed bag, but he certainly knows his way around a camera, so if the writing isn’t as bloodless and convoluted as that film, it’ll be another one to watch.
I’m smack-dab in the middle of this one, and though I wasn’t quite sure where it was going at first, it’s turning into a nicely atmospheric slow burn that reminds me of a lot of what I like about H.P. Lovecraft’s writing without all of the baggage he brings with him. It opens with what might be reductively described as a gritty, Game-of-Thrones-style retelling of the story of Rumpelstiltskin, but as the adventures of the royal spymaster tasked with discovering the mysterious dwarf’s real name wind on, it makes the mischievous fairytale character a harbinger of ancient evil, before leaping forward to a nightmarishly druggy interlude in modern-day Mexico which introduces us to Don and Michelle, the central characters for the rest of the book so far. From there, it begins bouncing backward and forward in time (I am starting to see a pattern here) through events in their life, narrative asides from their children and friends, and all along, the specter of that long-ago trip to Mexico haunts the edges of Don’s fitful memory. Something evil happened to Don back then, something with roots in the opening fairytale, and slightly wrong, unsettling details about Don and Michelle’s life together flit in and out of the narrative.
Although nothing’s really developed outright by where I am in the book, the sum product of all of these different stories - stories from different places and different times, many colored with the patina of an unsavory family history - create this feeling that there’s something very bad coming, something very old, and very powerful, a feeling of fates long ago sealed. It’s an audacious book, and it’d make a hell of a film, or maybe a limited-run series, if handled with taste and restraint.
Available from Amazon
Penpal
A Head Full Of Ghosts
The Croning
Did you read Paul Tremblay's newer book, Cabin at the End of the World? I read it before A Head Full of Ghosts and like both books quite a bit.
ReplyDeleteI have not, but after A Head Full Of Ghosts, I'll certainly check it out.
DeleteI recently finished Penpal. Thanks so much for the recommendation. I found it hard to get into the writing at various points, but, wow, what a creepy book!
DeleteYeah, his style's a little fragmented, and the way it jumps around in time can sometimes make it a little hard to follow, but given that it's his first published work and originally appeared as discrete stories on the r/nosleep subreddit, it's not bad at all. (I can't recommend his second book, Bad Man, as strongly - the writing isn't bad at all but it is in dire need of an editor.)
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