FINAL BOY

Oh, this really is the stuff. I absolutely adored this book.

It is a story about a family, and very specifically two sisters – Merry who is 8 and Marjorie who is 14.

The story is told mostly from the perspective of an 8 year old Merry, telling of her family and home life. Or at least someone who is now an adult really trying hard to remember how it all felt at the time.

Merry has got a great voice – she’s fizzy and excitable and asks lots of questions and wants to know everything. Some things, like whether people like pickles feel charged with importance to her, whilst things that are actually critical pass her by.

With that perspective, you also get a narrator that sees things from a particular angle – she picks up on lots of conversations that the adults are having that they assume are going over her head and how she tries to make sense of it and also how from a real ground level how things were feeling for a little girl who is confused and scared and just wants her big sister to be the way she used to be.

Something is going on with Marjorie, and it seems to be more than her just growing up and becoming an adolescent. She begins to tell Merry stories that aren’t the happy funny stories she used to tell, and that are dark and frightening. She comes into Merry’s bedroom at night and leaves notes that make Merry feel scared. Her parents start getting more and more worried about Marjorie and the conversations about her become increasingly tense.

Then we also shift and find out that a TV company have come to the family home and are making a reality TV show about the family. The show is called The Possession,

The bookt has some really genuinely unsettling moments – particularly when Marjorie says something really horrible to Merry, or Marjories troubles really become very vivid. The atmosphere throughout is suspenseful and tense, and having the viewpoint of the 8 year old allows her to be bright and breezy about things and events that we as the reader are aware are much more serious and dark than she is able to comprehend. The relationships between Merry and her sister, Marjorie and everyone, the two parents who are being destroyed by what is happening but in really different directions just held my attention throughout.

The book is obviously a love letter to The Exorcist, but it is also an advancement of those themes – how does a possession feel in a world where that film is well-known, where we understand mental health a bit better, where reality TV can intrude into people’s lives and where those observers make it apparent that periods where there’s no drama aren’t going to be good for the success of the show, where people can and do fake things for attention. Oh, it’s just so good. You go back and forth every couple of pages on what your thoughts are about Marjorie and what’s happening for her, and the last chapters are just such a punch in the gut.

I know that some people don’t care for an ending that doesn’t make its firm conclusion apparent for the reader as to what this is, and what has happened, but i quite like some ambiguity from time to time – it’s up to you, the reader to draw their conclusion about Marjorie and her family and how you feel about things. Some of my favourite books do that, and i think it works here. I’ve heard that Tremblay possibly did that a bit too often in his early works and is moving away from it a bit now, but for this particular book I’m very happy with it.

Honestly, I just completely loved this book, and I’d heartily recommend it.