*Spoiler Alert*

Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts (2015) is hands-down the best treatment of possession in the age of hypermediation. Bringing into play the power of religious belief, the economic exploitation of children, the culture of spectacle and–just maybe–the actual supernatural–Tremblay dramatizes the impossibility of finding a definitive truth amid endlessly multiplying interpretations. Since he’s clearly got the social media age pinned down–I mean, what else is there to add or improve upon in this modern classic?–I was excited to see that Daisy Pearce was taking possession back to the 1980s, before the proliferation of personal technologies, when questions of voice, authenticity, and truth were still slippery, but in different ways. Like Tremblay, Pearce examines the role of poverty, faith, parenting, and media (here it’s the newspaper and not reality TV) in both eliciting and shaping possession narratives. The problem is that, while A Head Full of Ghosts revels in indeterminacy, Pearce is so uncomfortable with it that she pulls a Godwin’s Law move, introducing a child molester into a story that doesn’t need one and, in this way, collapsing narrative nuance into clear, moralizing answers. This move to cut corners is also evident in the construction of Mina, a protagonist whose backstory is a perfect example of what Parul Sehgal calls the “trauma plot.” This threadbare trope reduces a protagonist’s entire personality to a past traumatic experience–the nature of which is revealed in constant flashbacks–and dictates a by now painfully predictable arc of confrontation, acceptance and healing. What makes this particular instantiation of the trauma plot especially bad is that Mina’s backstory is a tale of pure Victorian melodrama, obviously out of place in a contemporary narrative. And this brings me to my biggest issue with the novel–its underestimation of the reader. It’s as if we, unable to calculate what was probable at different historical periods, might be convinced to take the 1880s for the 1980s. Similarly, we have to forget everything we know when considering the novel’s premise, a set-up in the realist mode, that can’t withstand even the lightest scrutiny. To be clear, I realize that not every book can be A Head Full of Ghosts and I’m perfectly willing to leave my brain at the door for a good time–everyone loves a popcorn horror novel–but, with its relentlessly dreary tone, Something in the Walls isn’t just unsophisticated, it’s also downright joyless.  

Something in the Walls is set in the summer of 1989 in Cornwall, England, where an extreme heatwave is causing widespread misery. Our main character, Mina Ellis, has recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and is planning her wedding to Oscar, an older, straightlaced, physicist. Despite her recent academic achievement and upcoming marriage, Mina is unhappy. Her relationship with Oscar is troubled and, without experience, she can’t get ahead in her chosen field (or so she says–more on that later). To make matters worse, Mina is overwhelmed by guilt and grief: When she was a teen, her beloved younger brother, Eddie, died of pneumonia, and she’s never recovered from the loss. At a bereavement support group, she meets Sam, a journalist who is struggling with the death of his young daughter, Maggie. Combining his personal quest to contact Maggie’s spirit with his work as a reporter, Sam has been investigating Alice Webber, a troubled teen who claims to be possessed by a witch. He invites Mina to assist him on the case in her capacity as a child psychologist, and she jumps at the chance to hone her professional skills. They arrive in Banathel, the rural and poverty-stricken town where the Weber family lives, and Mina is struck by what she sees as the unhealthy persistence of superstitious beliefs and practices–a macabre atmosphere which she suspects may be feeding into Alice’s psychological problems. Crowds gather outside the teen’s house, lighting candles, scrawling symbols, and beseeching her to communicate with their dead loved ones. But when three people connected to Alice die unexpectedly, the reverence quickly turns to condemnation as the townspeople accuse her of witchcraft and turn to traditional rituals for casting out the devil. Can Mina deescalate the situation before it spirals out of control, or is her personal history clouding her better judgement?

The novel’s premise is a stumbling block for me, and since it’s the foundation on which everything else rests, I had a hard time engaging with the world Pearce creates. Contrary to what Mina says, no one expects a Psyche BA to round up, cowboy style, their own patients for independent counseling and, in fact, to do so without guidance would be considered inappropriate and unethical. I know that 1989 was a long time ago, but the academic landscape wasn’t the wild west; then, as now, it would have been unheard of for someone in Mina’s position to meet a deeply troubled teen and offer diagnoses outside of a clinical setting and without supervision of any kind. If this were arcane knowledge, limited to specialists in the field, then I could see leaving it out of the story. But anyone who’s been to university could guess that therapy at this level would require an advanced degree, and if you didn’t know, you could look it up. That’s my problem with this slip: Either Pearce assumes we are ignorant or she couldn’t be bothered to do some really basic research. And that stance–either to the reader or to the act of writing, take your pick–shapes the entire work so that it feels like a long exercise in condescension. 

Quick aside: I can imagine someone arguing that the whole point of the premise is to establish Mina’s recklessness; that her acting beyond the bounds of her profession is a nice trick of characterization, showing (without telling) us that she is a rule-breaking troublemaker. That would be clever, but I don’t think it’s what’s going on here for the simple reason that, in the world of the novel, her desire to score a first case is presented as a given. Even Oscar, her by-the book boyfriend, sees nothing really wrong with what she’s doing except for the fact that she’s not being paid for her “expertise.” For him, it’s not the potential teen patient who is vulnerable and exploited in this situation, but poor Mina who has been “finagled” into working for free. And since he lives and breathes within the university system, his perspective–while not reliable in other instances–establishes the norm when it comes to academia. So, no, I don’t think we’re supposed to recognize that the inciting situation presents a serious breach in reality. But I can’t help it. Mina’s insistence that, in order to get ahead, she must solicit her own (child) clients is so over-the-top that I can’t suspend my disbelief. Nor should I have to in a book that–up to this point in the story–isn’t grappling with ghosts and demons, but just trying to approximate the actuality of 80s Britain.

If the beginning of the novel is a challenge for me, so, too, is the end. Faced with social and economic decline, Banathel, we’re told repeatedly, needs Alice as a scapegoat, a convenient person to take the blame for problems that are too complex to untangle and too amorphous to face directly. It seems to me that, like the town, the plot of the book also needs a scapegoat, and that figure is Bert the pedophile, a character engaged in acts so indisputably evil–I mean, who doesn’t hate a child molester?–as to shut down all other narrative possibilities. When Mina first arrives in Banathel, she outlines the layered conditions that could underlie Alice’s so-called possession and explain the town’s continued fascination with the Riddance ritual–a traditional ceremony meant to counter witchcraft. While she considers how the coercive forces of tradition, belief, and poverty could combine to fuel the teen’s inexplicable behavior, she’s careful to keep all options open, even leaving wiggle room for supernatural and meteorological causes–it wouldn’t be the first time that intense heat made people crazy! The thing is, Mina raises lots of interesting questions, but she never tries to answer them. We get vague ramblings from Paul and others about Banathel being built on the bones of witches, but the town’s actual relationship with England’s early modern witch hunts remains unclear. Moreover, the witch who supposedly speaks through Alice is never given a name–Was she an actual historical figure or just a figment of the girl’s imagination? If she was real, what happened to her and what does she want now? Obviously, a visit to a local archive would have been in order, but Mina and Sam are too busy doing very little–certainly not engaging Alice in productive conversation, interviewing her former friends, or anything else that might explain or improve her situation. 

Ultimately Pearce tosses these topics to the side, I suspect, because she’s not sure what to do with them. One option would have been to suspend them in a delicate tension, ending the novel on a tantalisingly indeterminate note à la Paul Tremblay in A Head Full of Ghosts. But that’s not the approach she takes. Instead, she shelves murky subjects that resist clear resolution and focuses on something black and white–child molesters are bad. It turns out that Bert, the much-beloved neighbour who, for decades, has been taking in troubled girls, isn’t the hero everyone thought he was. Discovering an envelope of polaroids, Mina learns that he was actually drugging, undressing, and photographing minors, sexually traumatizing his victims before funneling them into Riddance ceremonies–the public expiatory rituals over which he presides. Through this injection of pedophilia and sadism, Peace approaches story-telling vis-a-vis Godwin’s law: An undeniably revolting figure like Bert immediately eclipses all other considerations and narrative possibilities, which means that we no longer have to think about the myriad factors at play in Banathel because, well, child molestation. It feels like a cheap shot, a clear-cut climax to a complicated story that Pearce perhaps feared might collapse under the weight of a more ambiguous ending. I wish she had taken the risk. 

Not only does the introduction of a pedophile simplify the story’s through line, but it forces us to side with Mina–a character who, otherwise, might not garner much sympathy. The novel’s final conflict pits her in a WWF-style faceoff against the arch-villain Bert so that, in this clear cut contest of good vs evil, we have no choice but to root for her. Still, I can’t help but roll my eyes at such heavy handed manipulation, and my resistance, once again, comes from the lack of plausibility–not so much the plausibility of the situation (though it is painfully contrived) but of her character in general. Mina’s entire identity, like that of so many other characters in contemporary fiction, is based on a traumatic event, which–while reductive in and of itself–is made even worse by the fact that the incident in question could have been pulled from the yellowing pages a 19th-century melodrama: The embodiment of joy and innocence, Eddie catches a fatal case of pneumonia by going outside in the cold weather and lying briefly on the surface of a frozen lake. This scenario is already positively Victorian, but Pearce ratchets up the treacly sentimentality by repeatedly telling us that Eddie only went onto the ice (brace yourself) to save Mina, who had fallen through! 

It’s important to remember here that 1983–the year he would have died–was not the Stone Age. Back then, we knew that viruses weren’t transmitted by cold temperatures and even had things like hospitals and antibiotics. Pneumonia was treatable and, while it’s certainly possible that a teenager with a weakened immune system could succumb to the illness, such an outcome would have been unusual. Unless, of course, you’re in Pearce’s 1980s, where there’s no medical intervention on Eddie’s behalf and he’s left to wither away in his bedroom. Is she trying to make the point that Mina’s parents are neglectful? Of course, but this goes into the realm of criminal behavior, and I don’t think she’s suggesting that they’re murderers, just disinterested. The obvious purpose of this Dickensian tale is to evoke compassion for the grieving Mina. For me, however, it seriously backfires. While Dickens’ Little Nell had readers bawling in 1841, that kind of character is comical now–and if there are tears in my eyes, it’s from laughter, not sadness. 

The narrative of Eddie’s death isn’t as straightforward as Mina initially leads us to believe, and it’s her confrontation with these elided details that–in full keeping with the “trauma plot”–is the key to her character’s arc, such as it is. Toward the end of the novel, we discover that Mina hastened Eddie’s death by smothering him with a pillow. When we finally have access to this memory, it’s framed, not as a murder, but as a mercy killing–she just couldn’t bear to watch his suffering any more and, besides, his death was imminent. Her responsibility for the act is lessened even further by his complicity. Just before she places the cushion over his face, Eddie asks her to repeat the story of how–cue the violins–he saved her from the ice, so that he can ascend to heaven on memories of his own heroism. It’s clearly supposed to be a bittersweet moment and we’re supposed to regard Mina’s deed as noble, something that any compassionate person might do for a loved one. But is it? The logic of her trauma arc is that, once she’s confronted this difficult event, letting herself recall it in its entirety, she can accept what she’s done–which shouldn’t be hard since it’s presented as a loving gesture–and release the guilt that’s been holding her back. It’s all very feel-good pop psychology. Still, if earlier we were listening to a maudlin violin score, this apotheosis of therapeutic self-love is, at least for me, when the strings snap. Honorable intentions or not, I don’t think Mina should let herself off the hook so easily for killing a 14 year old boy with a treatable illness. And I think that this is why Mina has to go to war with a pedophile. Without the clear moral authority that such a fight gives her, readers like me might enjoy watching the townspeople take her out Summerisle style. Hell, even with the Bert battle, I would have much preferred a Wickerman-esque ending in which Mina goes up in flames.

I don’t want to be accused of subjecting a female protagonist to the “likeability” test, a battery of assessments gauging relatability, friendliness, and morality to which male characters are rarely subjected. My problem with Mina isn’t that she’s unlikeable. Rather, it’s that she feels like the creation of someone who is pandering to their decidedly female audience, making assumptions about women readers that trouble me. Even though the premise is, as I’ve said, absurd, we’re expected to overlook the book’s dubious world-building because, of course, we’re all supposed to be girl boss feminists rooting for Mina, a woman stalled on her career path and, worse yet, engaged to an insensitive man who doesn’t support her ambition! Pearce also assumes that we’ve drunk the kool aid of self-care feminism with its privileging of emotional validation above all else. From the presentation of the traumatic memory to Alice’s psychic message of forgiveness (He 4 gives U!), it’s clear that we’re supposed to celebrate and share in that cathartic moment when Mina finally releases the guilt of having murdered her brother. Because as any woman who is exposed to the constant barrage of the wellness industry knows, the most important thing is self-acceptance full stop. After finishing this book, I sat imagining the kinds of toxic conversations that must happen among writers and publishing professionals when they try to imagine what women want.