A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay
Published 2015 · 286 pages · 91,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Horror, Psychological Horror, Literary Fiction
How hard is A Head Full of Ghosts to read?
A Head Full of Ghosts scores 63 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 40 out of 100
- Tremblay writes in plain, contemporary American English — no invented terms, no archaic diction. The vocabulary sits closer to The Great Gatsby's polish than to genre pulp, with clinical and religious terminology (psychosis, exorcism, deliverance) doing double duty as horror vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Sentences stay short and propulsive, built for a reader racing through chapters late at night. Merry's child-voice passages run choppy and fragmented, and the blog-post sections mimic casual internet prose; neither register approaches the nested clauses of literary maximalism.
- Abstraction: 47 out of 100
- The novel stays grounded in a single house and one family's unraveling, but its central question — demonic possession or psychotic break — forces sustained abstract reasoning about faith, diagnosis, and belief, with exorcism theology and psychiatric explanation argued in parallel throughout.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Two interlocking narratives — Merry's interview testimony and a horror blogger's episode-by-episode recaps — double the information load per chapter, each cross-referencing genre touchstones like The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror. The pacing still reads like commercial fiction, not encyclopedic prose.
- Narrative indirection: 80 out of 100
- Merry narrates as both the eight-year-old who lived through the events and the twenty-three-year-old recounting them to a stranger, and neither version fully trusts the other. Key facts — what actually happened in the house, who started the fire — are never stated outright, only assembled from contradictory testimony.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- The reality show's title, 'The Possession,' does triple duty: demon, TV camera, and family secret all possess the Barretts at once. Marjorie's bedtime story to Merry mirrors the novel's own structure, and the attic recurs as a symbol of what the family refuses to look at directly.
- Ironic distance: 70 out of 100
- Tremblay builds an entire subplot — a horror blogger recapping the in-novel reality show — that mocks the exact tropes his own novel is using, so the book comments on its genre while fully committing to it. The gap between the network's marketing (a family healed by faith) and what actually happens drives the novel.
- Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
- The book ends without confirming whether Marjorie was possessed, psychotic, or performing, and without confirming what Merry herself did the night of the fire. Readers get testimony, blog theorizing, and gaps — never a verdict.
- Structural complexity: 70 out of 100
- Three timelines and three narrative registers interlock: present-day interview transcript, Merry's childhood memory, and a blogger's retrospective recaps of the televised events. None of them fully agree, and the novel makes readers reconcile the discrepancies themselves.
How A Head Full of Ghosts is regarded
A Head Full of Ghosts holds a literary regard score of 56 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.