A Head Full of Ghosts

A Head Full of Ghosts is a 2015 award-winning horror novel by Paul Tremblay. I enjoyed this, but there's not really anything new here. It's basically a is-it-possession-or-mental-illness exploration told by the younger sister. I had expected this to be scary, but I didn't find it so. I say if you want a scary book read the Bram Stoker Dracula.

from the back of the book:

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 for a reality television show. With John, Marjorie's father, out of work for more than a year and the medical bills looming, the family reluctantly agrees to be filmed -never imagining that The Possession would become an instant hit. 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 from her childhood -she was just eight years old- painful memories and long-buried secrets that clash with the television broadcast and the Internet blogs begin to surface.

There are several references to the yellow wallpaper in the house that put me in mind of Gilman's book, which can be read online here. There are also references to Gloomy Sunday:

Sunday is gloomy,

My hours are slumberless.

Dearest, the shadows

I live with are numberless.

Little white flowers

Will never awaken you.

Not where the black coach

Of sorrow has taken you.

The Guardian says the book "scares in layers" and that "wherever it comes from, there’s real evil at the heart of this book – and just in time for Halloween." io9 says it "will scare the shit out of you". NPR calls it an "eerie, edgy tale of perception and possession". The New York Times calls it "terrific".