I Have Never Been So Disappointed By a Book

Paul Tremblay is my absolute favorite author of all time.

Or…he was. I’m not sure after this. I’m re-evaluting.

His book Head Full of Ghosts is the most brilliant work of fiction I’ve ever read.

I guess I connected with Head Full of Ghosts because the parents perform an exorcism and believe their teenage daughter is possessed.

My mom believed something similar about me. An attachment haunting. She was abusive before she got that idea into her head, but the way she weilded this demon this “icky” this nefarious spirit over me, just always blaming me for being haunted. I wish I could fully explain to everyone what that felt like.

So this book is about parents who believe in the supernatural and it is a book for adults with a child protagonist. I was so blown away by it. I was so inspired by it. I wrote my own horror novel for adults with a child protagonist. It is not an accurate nitty gritty portrayal of my childhood. But I tried so hard to capture how those years felt. I believe I succeeded. And I owe so much of my writing style and the risks I take to the inspiration I got from Paul Tremblay’s book.

His books always move me and strike at something deep inside of me. I’ve never taken more then 3 days to read a Paul Tremblay novel, because they are impossible to put down. Even this one.

This book really was impossible to put down. The characters were great. The tension had me literally gasping out loud.

So why a two star rating?

It’s really because this book made me feel bad. Maybe that was the point. Maybe the point is to make conservatives feel bad.

And with me having admitted I’m a conservative, I am now a bad evil fascist person in the eyes of many left-leaning people reading this. It doesn’t matter which specific conservative views I hold, or WHY I hold them, or what values or reasoning led me to those views. Even if the logic or facts that I based my views on were flawed or incorrect, wouldn’t that just make me dumb and uninformed? Not a bad person? I’m not saying I am. I’m just saying, I’m so tired of being called an evil fascist villain. Instead, maybe tell me why I’m wrong and if what you say makes sense, maybe I’ll change my opinion.

I have drastically changed my views before. I used to be incredibly liberal.

Well, let me talk about the book before I get into that:

There are conservative characters in this book that are absolute stereotypes.

This book is meant to be allegory for the Covid virus.

And Tremblay makes sure to include a right-wing militia.

Where are the left-wing rioters?

I did not identify as a conservative, even privately, even just in my own head, until the riots of 2020.

I am in favor of protesting. It’s in the first amendment. I am not in favor of property destruction or violence.

There was rioting in my city and I was scared.

Okay? There it is. I was scared. I was so so fucking scared.

Maybe I was dumb to be scared. I was still really really scared and it felt horrible.

There was so much violence in my house when I was a kid. And it’s not so much the violence itself. Because you can always sort of pull your brain out of your body and wait for it to stop. Making it through a prolonged act of violence is simple. Violence is simple. It’s passive. You just wait. And you tell yourself, this will be over at some point because it’s always over at some point. And you don’t let yourself think anything like ‘it will end, but then more awful stuff will come after and is that all life is? Waiting for the next horrible thing?’ No, you don’t start to think stuff like that until you’re actually safe. You realize you’re safe and then things get really hard. Surviving violence is easier than trying to put your brain back together afterwards. When my mom burned my sister’s arm and the skin kept peeling and kept peeling and when she nearly beat our dog to death with a chain, my brain felt like it was going to come apart. And every day, decades later, it is so much work to take all the pieces rattling around in there and try to shove them into some kind of placement where they don’t jangle and get in the way too much.

I don’t want any more broken pieces banging around. I was so so scared of feeling the way I felt when I saw my mom hurt my younger sister like that, when I saw her hurt our dog and he kept screaming like I never heard anything scream.

I was scared.

And then on twitter, liberals-other liberals like me, because while I had started to become disillusioned with feminism (for constantly trying to make me a victim when all I want is to figure out how to be tough and I want to figure out how to NOT blame the world for my problems), I still identified as liberal.

Liberals on twitter, as I was so so scared, they said, “If you’re worried about property damage, then YOU have your priorities messed up.” Even though 30 people died across the country in those riots, people like David Dorne.

Those same liberals said, “There is no violence. It’s propoganda.”

Those same liberals said, “silence is violence.”

Those same liberals said, “Change always requires violence.”

Those same liberals, the ones who defended violence in the name of social change, they eventually said, “All the violence is being caused by right-wingers.”

And I detested them for it. For implying I was racist for being afraid. For defending the lockdowns that sent me spiraling into depression and obsession and I felt my brain coming apart again and couldn’t do anything about it, and manically obsessively posted weird comments all over reddit and incel forums, at the height of my depression-induced crazy, wanting nothing but to get back out in the world so that I could feel a little less weird. And anyone who didn’t want the lockdowns was a fascist and a horrible evil person who didn’t care about other people.

I tried so hard to keep my head on during lockdown, and it wasn’t on all that tight to begin with, okay?

Wanting life to stay normal was fascist. Evil. Bad. I was a bad person for not wanting a quarantine.

But the protesters and rioters swarming together by the hundreds were fine.

The lack of logic made me so angry. The way my fear and depression and stir-crazy anxiety were minimized and I was labeled a bad person for even having those feelings…

And so, I found Ben Shapiro and Tim Poole and they made me feel better.

I’m still calling myself a conservative because I am still so angry at the vast majority of liberals, many of whom I’ve known or followed online for years, for making me feel so unsafe and then making me feel like such a bad person for feeling unsafe.

This is a political book review because Paul Tremblay made his book political.

Conservatives are a cardboard flat stereotype.

Criticism of Trump is in the ext. Criticism of conservatives and militias is in the text.

Criticism of anything left-leaning in the slightest? Of course not. Criticism of the rioters who burned down buildings and killed over 30 people? This is supposed to be allegory of the 2020 virus after all. Where is the chaos of last spring? Not in here.

This is not a nuanced work of fiction. This is a political viewpoint hidden in a story. It’s a well-written, breathtaking story, but the agenda ruins it for me.

I’m not a bad person for my political beliefs. I don’t want anything to do with a side of the political spectrum where the mainstream defends and minimizes violence.

Maybe you don’t agree with my reasoning. But if you look at the emotions and thoughts that brought me to my conclusion, you can see that I’m not a bad person, right? Even if my reasoning is flawed and my facts are wrong, did a moral failing bring me to my conclusions?

Maybe so. But again, you have to do more than call me a fascist to get me to reconsider.

Paul Tremblay refers to conservative characters who believe conspiracy theories on reddit as “fascists.” Aren’t they just gullible? Aren’t they just uninformed?

I was so so disappointed to see a writer I always viewed as so nuanced and so able to look into issues that are so complexly, deeply human, so disappointed to see him write stereotypes of conservatives, straw men to take pot shots at.

This book made me feel bad. I guess maybe that was the point of it.

I’m not sure why though. Liberals making me feel bad is why I left the left in the first place.