A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay (William Morrow Paperbacks) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Questioning possession: inventive novel swerves horror trope in new direction. 

While getting accustomed to Paul Tremblay’s Bram Stoker Award-winning A Head Full of Ghosts, I kept asking myself: do I like this, or don’t I? The more I read, though, the more I moved towards the “like this” option. 

Like many Tremblay novels, this one takes a common horror subject – this time it’s possession – and gives it a twist. A Head Full of Ghosts swerves from the expected, steps back, and, in a way, explores what a possession story is. It starts silly with young sisters Meredith (Merry) and Marjorie telling each other stories about molasses floods or things growing in their house, but the book gradually reels the reader in as things start to go wrong in the Barrett family’s Massachusetts home. 

The story hinges on the question of whether Marjorie is possessed or mentally ill. When the girls’ father John loses his job and has trouble finding another, he turns to prayer and becomes a religious zealot. To alleviate their growing financial difficulties, the Barretts become the subjects of a reality show called The Possession. A film documents the family and especially Marjorie, the one who claims to have the ghosts in her head. 

As the novel builds towards an exorcism event, Tremblay plays with opposites (e.g. cold and hot, fiction and nonfiction) to suspend the uncertainty. Father Waverly, the aptly named priest involved with the family, talks about the financial gain coming from the TV show. And fourteen-year-old Marjorie seems to enjoy the limelight. Perhaps this is all a moneymaking and/or an attention-getting scheme. But then again, how is Marjorie accessing the knowledge that she confidently spews at the priest? What are these strange things happening in her room? She could just be a precocious kid, or maybe there’s something else going on. 

Tremblay also flips around in time and narrative format. While much of the story plays out through the perspective of eight-year-old Merry, the novel also contains passages in which a woman planning to write a tell-all book interviews a twenty-three-year-old Merry to get her side of what happened on the show. Additionally, excerpts from The Final Last Girl blog reinforce the ambiguity of the situation. Blogger Karen Brissette, writing fifteen years after the show, rips it apart, commenting on its amateur cast, lewd imagery and clichés. She references everything from The Exorcist and Lolita to more recent works like The Ring and a “lukewarm parade of possession movies” from the 2000s. The blog is most interesting when its chatty author breaks down scenes from the show. Some readers might not like getting pulled out of the story for this deconstruction. I happened to enjoy it. 

Beyond a possession novel, A Head Full of Ghosts comments on contemporary media and art and their ability to manipulate actors and yes, even readers and viewers. Typically, revisiting worn-out horror tropes would be anathema to good storytelling, but in Tremblay’s hands, everything you’ve come to expect moves in a new direction. Douglas J. Ogurek ****

Millionaires Day by Kit Power (French Press Publishing) | review by Stephen Theaker

We cannot be sure if the phenomenon extends beyond Milton Keynes – there is a news blackout – but it seems that everyone in that city who was asleep at 8.04 am on 22 December 2019 woke up with a suitcase containing a million pounds beneath them. You might wonder why, but this novella isn’t very interested in that. Instead, it concerns itself with how various ne’er-do-wells try to get their hands on other people’s suitcases, and how those others try to escape them.

At first we follow three main characters, each of whom hands us off at various points to other people. Henry is a homeless man sleeping in an underpass. He tries to get a first class train to Glasgow but is spotted by police officer Luke, who has been falling out of love with his husband for a while now, ever since their attempt to use a woman as a surrogate fell through. The mother kept her daughter, and the court hasn’t ordered contact despite Luke being the biological father.

The God of Wanking by Peter Caffrey | review by Stephen Theaker

In August 2024 I attended a free one-day convention organised by Indie Horror Chapter in Birmingham, a gathering of self-published authors getting together to sell books, do readings and make friends. One of the most eye-catching tables was that of Peter Caffrey, whose books stood out thanks to their bright colours, striking designs and memorable titles. Here was an author clearly doing his own thing, not trying to mimic mainstream horror, carving out a very specific niche. You probably won’t see Whores Versus Sex Robots and Other Sordid Tales of Erotic Automatons on sale in Waterstones.

The God of Wanking – and titles don’t come much more attention-grabbing than that! – is a short novel first published in 2021. Our protagonist is Diego, who attends a strict catholic school in a village that would seem to be in Central or South America. It wasn’t clear which, but the power of the Catholic church there appears to be totally unbridled – we see them snatching people off the street. When the book takes place was also unclear, but the villagers have televisions and don’t have mobile phones, which gives some idea.

Dangerous Animals | review by Rafe McGregor

Dangerous Animals, by Sean Byrne (Independent Film Company)

Tucker's shark experience!

In my birthday wishes to Jaws' (1975) Bruce, I mentioned the host of terrible Sharksploitation movies I've watched since reviewing The Meg (2018), listed the lowlights, and noted two films of which I was sceptical in spite of the advance praise they had received. I've now watched both Fear Below (2025) and Dangerous Animals and can attest to the accuracy of my preconceptions about the former, which is indeed similar to Into the Deep (2025), with its well-deserved 27% on the Tomatometer. I won't say much about it here, except that I didn't think the shark very realistic and that sharks in rivers just aren't as frightening as sharks in the ocean, a pair of problems plaguing Under Paris (2024), entirely undeserving of its 66% on the Tomatometer. My reservations about Dangerous Animals were based on the trailer, which I summarised rather meanly (albeit, again, accurately) as an eye-rolling 'shark plus serial killer'. My point being… surely one is enough for a ninety-eight-minute film? Whenever I watch what is essentially a monster movie, I'm reminded of The Ghost and The Darkness (1996), a fictionalised account of the 'Tsavo man-eaters' in colonial Kenya in 1898. While the film is yet another example of the tired old trope of (hu)man versus nature, director Stephen Hopkins is surprisingly successful in making two 'normal' lions a source of suspense and fear – as Sherlock Holmes might have said, 'no dinosaurs need apply' (the first two instalments of the Jurassic Park franchise were released in 1993 and 1997 respectively).

The dangerous animal of this title is of course the serial killer, Tucker (played by Jai Courtney), not the shark(s) and what redeems it from being yet more chum to the maw (with apologies to Mark Bould) of Sharksploitation enthusiasts like me is that we don't see sharks very often and when we do, they are all real (as far as I can tell, anyway) until the last ten minutes. When a CGI shark does appear, it is convincing rather than cartoonish, which may well be because of the speed with which it disappears. We don't have to see sharks all the time to be scared and less is often more (as we know from M.R. James, among many other masters of the craft of horror fiction). So, yes, in its finest moments the film reminded me of Jaws, where the only flaw is when Bruce is revealed as a creature of fibreglass and steel rather than flesh and bone. Unlike Jaws, Dangerous Animals lacks sympathetic characters. Tucker himself is probably the most charismatic, but he does like to kidnap pairs of bikini-clad beauties and videotape one being fed to sharks in front of the other. (Actual VHS, not digital – no wonder he has issues!) It is also rather predictable. Very early on, I guessed that Tucker would be eaten by sharks and that the love interest, Moses (played by Josh Heuston), would not rescue the protagonist, Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), at least one of which came to pass. Notwithstanding, the film was much better than expected and one of the best Sharksploitation films I've seen. But if Zephyr thinks that Australia's Gold Coast is 'as far away from America as possible' she really needs to install Google Maps or ChatGPT on her smartphone (it's Mauritius or Madagascar, in case you're wondering). ***

Envy by Ash Ericmore | review by Stephen Theaker

Envy is a 45-page, eight-chapter novella, the first in a series of seven about the deadly sins, self-published by the author (with a nod to his Patreon supporters) over the summer of 2025. The Amazon blurb tells us each novella will focus on a different female lead. I don’t think we ever learn the name of this book’s lead character, and if it weren’t for the Amazon description I don’t think we would know her sex for certain either, but I’ll assume for the purposes of this review that the description doesn’t lead us astray.

She lives in a tall, lonely tower block, obsessed with the local drug dealer and his gym-built muscles. He’s called Tony, and she knows that because her neighbour Miriam shouts it several times a night, in the throes of passion. Our protagonist gets in the lift with him at one point, and hopes to be propositioned if not ravished, but he just asks if she wants to buy some drugs. She seems to assume that any man looking at her does so with sexual interest, and perhaps her sleazy anime fan boss is, but he’s not what she’s after.