The great values ​​of horror genre more international today are, in great numbers, those XNUMX-year-olds with whom I share my generation and imagination. An imaginary that goes from The Exorcist to Elm Street through Salem's Lot (or any other adaptation of the Stephen King scared version). They are the Joe hill, JD Barker or with a Paul Tremblay not so prolific so far but just as ecstatic in what strangely provokes fear in us as a morbid incentive.
Tremblay's approach is to approach the worst of the frontiers of fear towards the loss of reason or at least towards its lurking shadows. Because the unfathomable space inhabited by ghosts, gloomy dreams, shocking premonitions and sinister growing certainties that are born from the darkness, in short, bathe the turbulent ocean to which Tremblay leads us.
And there it throws us so that we swim and even dive to the abyssal depths of consciousness. Nothing more terrifying than that touch from a parallel dimension where the most atavistic threats assault our vision of the world. Welcome to that special place, away from everything common, where unfortunately (or luckily if you are going to discover the wild side of things) the fantastic is not synonymous with color and life ...
Top 3 recommended novels Paul Tremblay
A head full of ghosts
The wolf may be inside. The threat, the hostile, can be a black flower germinating from that internal forum that contemplates life with a suspicion and a fear capable of self-destruction ...
The Barretts' peaceful life takes a turn when their fourteen-year-old daughter Marjorie begins to show horrible symptoms of schizophrenia that doctors are unable to mitigate. Soon enough, the situation has gotten so bad that his descent into madness seems unstoppable.
Desperate, the father asks a priest for help to practice an exorcism. And that's when a twist takes place: due to his financial problems, he accepts the offer of a reality TV production company to record everything.
Fifteen years later, a writer interviews Marjorie's little sister. As she recounts the tragedy, a shocking story unfolds that raises questions about memory and reality, the media, the power of science and religion, and the very nature of evil.
Winner of the Bram Stoker Novel Award, A Head Full of Ghosts is a fascinating book that combines horror with mystery, family drama and critique of the spectacle society in the wake of The Shining of Stephen King, The Curse of Hill House by Shirley Jackson and The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty.
Disappearance on devil's rock
Nothing more disconcerting than a disappearance to launch a narrative with airs of suspense. An issue that we at Paul Trembay know is going to involve something very dark. Surely any kind of influence of evil has been able to drag the missing young Tommy.
The boy's mother, Elizabeth, knows of the unfortunate event while the police continue to turn to the place of the disappearance, very close to the mythical Devil's Rock.
The problem is that Tommy may not be in a place accessible to the most instinctive investigators. When a ghostly image of the boy (it reminded me of that dying boy in pajamas scratching at the window in the movie Salem's Lot) begins to pass through the streets of the town, the idea of ​​an inconceivable curse spreads among the neighbors.
The only one who can discover clues about what happened is her own mother, Elizabeth, who, amidst the general misunderstanding, senses that her dreams contain messages.
Saving her son Tommy turns into a nightmare that will seek the limits of maternal love, which will confront her with all imaginable demons in a struggle between evil and love, because only love can tend a pulse to hell.
In Tommy's room, in the pages of his diary ... It seems as if there was a possibility, an option to receive instructions from his own son who had already anticipated his fate, or to take the leave of returning to that diary to leave annotations.
But time is short, that is an undoubted feeling for Elizabeth. Only fear paralyzes and blocks. Getting to Tommy and freeing him from his curse can end up leading to too high debts ...
The cabin at the end of the world
It doesn't stop being interesting because it's hackneyed. The argument of the lonely place, separated from the hand of God, is essentially the perfect metaphor for loneliness, for the disturbing silence behind the noise with which we cover our lives. So each new author who faces this narrative paradigm takes on the greatest challenge as a storyteller, more than making us empathize, making us live in that place where nothing superfluous can distract us from our demons.
When little Wen and her parents go on vacation to a cabin by a secluded lake, they don't expect visitors. That is why the appearance of the first stranger is so surprising. Leonard is the biggest man Wen has ever seen, but he is also so kind that he wins his sympathy right away, even though the girl has always been forbidden to speak to strangers.
Leonard and Wen talk and laugh and play, and time flies by. Until he says some mysterious words: “Nothing that is going to happen is your fault. You haven't done anything wrong, but the three of you are going to have a few tough decisions to make. Dreadful, I'm afraid. Your parents won't let us in, Wen. But they will have to.
