Along with Catriona Ward's 'The Last House on Needless Street', this is one of the most critically acclaimed and highly regarded novels to make the Books of Horror Go To List. Oddly, it's also one of the most frequently dismissed by readers, but it's easy to see both sides because this book is a thoroughly ambiguous read; one that not only refuses to define what's true and what isn't but is more than happy to deconstruct itself within its own text. That makes it all the more fascinating, but to many readers it also makes it rather frustrating.

The plus side is that I really can't spoil this book because, having read it and formed my own take on what went down, I have absolutely no guarantee that I'm right. I could be completely wrong. In fact, I can see half a dozen different ways to take this, each one of which might be right and all of which might be wrong. What's it about? Well, your guess is as good as mine. The back cover hints that Majorie Barrett suffers from acute schizophrenia and maybe that's true. Certainly, where it seems to go is demonic possession, which is arguably the easiest way to read this, but there are a whole host of clues to suggest that Marjorie's faking everything, which is another pessimistic way to take it. I'll see you in book club and we can compare notes.

Whatever it's about, it's clearly centered on Marjorie, who's fourteen-years-old, but told from the perspective of her younger sister Merry, who's only eight and so doesn't understand much at all about what's going down. That's a fair perspective for Tremblay to take because his fundamental questions are about what's real. Do we take this as read? Marjorie's dad, who's turned to Jesus in his hour of need, firmly believes that she's possessed and manoeuvres things towards an exorcism. Her mum's interpretations, however, are rooted in science because religion is bunk. At heart, this is about the disintegration of a family. And is whatever Marjorie's doing bringing them together, as she tells Merry she wants, or wrenching them apart?

We have no idea if that's how we should read this. What we get is Merry's likely faulty memories, as recounted to a journalist in the present day, of what grew into a media circus when a reality TV show came in to document proceedings. Of course, "document" isn't a particularly accurate word because they jazzed everything up including writing dramatised sequences with actors playing the Barrett family on top of footage shot with them in their own house. Yes, the exorcism is televised. No, it doesn't go remotely well.

Add to this the deconstruction of the show by a blogger called Karen Brissette, who writes as "The Last Final Girl", digging deep into each episode of "The Possession" from the standpoint of fifteen years later. She isn't a fangirl per se; she dissects each episode with astute insight, calling out the many instances where the action mimics some pop culture creation, usually a movie, and berating that as derivative behaviour. I won't spoil who Brissette really is but the revelation, when it shows up, is perhaps the least surprising aspect to the entire novel, and it adds a whole new level to our understanding of what really happened and our lack of surety as to whether which parts, if any of them, were actually true.

In other words, plenty happened with the Barrett family and it's widely documented, not only by a ravenous public but through a reality TV show, and yet the only thing we can be sure about is that the family was fundamentally broken. To understand how and why, we have to rely on the memory of an eight-year-old girl, who lived that reality but also lived the reality TV version of that reality, which makes her question her own memory. We also rely on the dissection of the show by another hand, who calls out so many good points that we start to trust her, to the degree that we start to wonder if Marjorie is indeed possessed, but by the entirety of pop culture.

If that wasn't meta enough, Tremblay even throws real people into the story in fictional guises; an excellent example being Stephen Graham Jones, the tutor who takes on Merry after a calamitous final episode of 'The Possession'. Jones, for those who don't know, is another horror author with a title of his own on the Books of Horror Go To List in 'The Only Good Indians'. Another is the fashion in which Karen Brissette's blog posts very deliberately echo the Goodreads reviews of a different Karen, whose surname we don't know. This all makes us question Tremblay's part in this saga.

Clearly he's the author of the novel, which is presented as fiction, but by blurring in characters we know exist in our reality, he's suggesting that his story follows suit. It's as if he's really the writer of another reality show, not 'The Possession' but 'A Head Full of Ghosts', that similarly taking one source truth and morphing it into a very particular take on that truth. Why? Because every reality show creator believes that they understand what the audience wants to see and the story they tell is as much framed by that goal as by anything that actually happened. It's Marketing 101.

And, in turn, that makes this all about reality and our perception of it, which is about as topical a subject as there can be in 21^st-century America post-Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. This is a world in which politics has become entertainment, fought not on policies but according to a WWE-esque storyline of faces and heels. It's a world where alternative facts suggest that what's demonstrably true doesn't matter but what's perceived to be true does. It's a world where truth can change over time, affected as it is by every time it's told and every time it's heard.

Sure, this focuses on reality TV, but it's fundamentally about the people who make it, the people who appear in it and the people like you and me who eat it up, combined to present a new reality that may or may not resemble what actually happened to begin with. Every participant, down to the viewer and the blogger who deconstructs it afterwards, has their part to play in forging that reality. So, at the end of the day, what was it really about? We don't know but we surely have our interpretation that we'll happily force onto others.

And, of course, many people don't want that. It isn't their idea of entertainment. They want their novels to tell a straightforward story where people do things and it's obvious what it all means. It goes without saying that this is going to bore them to tears and frustrate them into DNFing. This certainly isn't for everybody. However, can I think of a better novel to bring to a horror book club? No, I can't. Now I want to join one just so that I can talk about my takes on this. And isn't that the reality of every water cooler in every office on every random day? That's good writing. ~~ Hal C F Astell