WINNER OF THE 2015 BRAM STOKER AWARD FOR SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN A NOVEL A chilling thriller that brilliantly blends psychological suspense and supernatural horror, reminiscent of Stephen King's The Shining, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, and William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist. The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia. To her parents’ despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie’s descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help. Father Wanderly suggests an exorcism; he believes the vulnerable teenager is the victim of demonic possession. He also contacts a production company that is eager to document the Barretts’ plight. With John, Marjorie’s father, out of work for more than a year and the medical bills looming, the family agrees to be filmed, and soon find themselves the unwitting stars of The Possession, a hit reality television show. When events in the Barrett household explode in tragedy, the show and the shocking incidents it captures become the stuff of urban legend. Fifteen years later, a bestselling writer interviews Marjorie’s younger sister, Merry. As she recalls those long ago events that took place when she was just eight years old, long-buried secrets and painful memories that clash with what was broadcast on television begin to surface—and a mind-bending tale of psychological horror is unleashed, raising vexing questions about memory and reality, science and religion, and the very nature of evil.

When the conversation started, the room was split even between likes, mehs, and dislikes about this very self-aware story of a family's experience with a horror reality show and the question of whether the older sister was possessed or crazy. Some people found the book scary and compelling; others thought it was not scary at all. Almost all of us liked the post-modern touches; we thought the blog were the narrator Merry (under an alias) critiques the reality show she was on as a child was compelling and true, and we liked that the story was aware of and in conversation with typical possession tropes from other media. Much of the debate was to be expected given the plot of the book - was the older sister Marjorie possessed or just mentally disturbed? But David rocked the conversation by pointing us to the end of the book and the description of Merry in the cafe and arguing that Merry was clearly possessed herself, due to the clear chill described in the cafe. We reread that passage, and it was obvious in retrospect that David was right, and that the book was more interesting than we expected. Nonetheless, a few of us still didn't love the book. While the family drama was very real to us, the relationships in the book just made us sad -- Marjorie was clearly mental ill and being tortured by the show, and the dad was a case study in someone who might kill their family, a great element of the story for consistency but not a fun one to read about. And there was the stubborn fact that a few of us didn't find the book scary at all. Some people thought the book worked as horror, but the rest of us were so ready for the bad things to happen that they had no punch. Overall though, no one in the end argued that the novel was bad. It was a good light read with an interesting take on ghost stories, just maybe one that would have been better if it were actually scary.