Paul G. Tremblay

This is a classic one.

Did you ever read Paul Tremblay's horror movie?

Sorry, what did you say? I don't know why I couldn't hear.

No. Paul Tremblay's horror movie.

Did you ever read that one?

Oh, no.

And there's one other point I will say while we're making references.

Friend of the show, Paul Tremblay, who is the person who got me to read this book, he told me I should read it.

I've been emailing him updates as we go.

But there's a scene... where there's an interview for a particular kind of military job.

Well, on that, we have to leave it.

Next time, we're going to be joined by award-winning horror writer Paul Tremblay.

He'll be answering questions about his novel, A Head Full of Ghosts, the unsettling story of a teenage girl whose father becomes dangerously convinced that she's possessed by a demon.

Stephen King, no less, has said that the novel scared the living hell out of him.

Oh, I read that! Yeah.

Yeah, and horror movie by Paul Tremblay.

Paul Tremblay wrote The Cabinet at the End of the World, which became that movie with Dave Bautista.

The book is better

than the movie.

Which brings us to our 10th and final book.

How does the classic horror of a fracturing family adapt to an era where we actively broadcast our own destruction? We are looking at Paul Tremblay's phenomenal 2015 novel, A Head Full of Ghosts.

Stephen King himself has highly praised Tremblay's work, and this novel perfectly illustrates why it is a razor sharp, incredibly self-aware deconstruction of the possession narrative.

It centers on the Barrett family, a normal middle class family in Massachusetts who are in the midst of a catastrophic financial and emotional collapse.

Proving that the most terrifying monsters are the ones we carry inside our own failing institutions.

We witnessed the primal, agonizing terror of parents fighting for their children against demons, supernatural kidnappers, and the literal nuclear apocalypse with William Peter Blatty, Joe Hill, and Robert McCammon.

And finally, we arrived at Paul Tremblay's modern nightmare, where our deepest traumas are commodified and broadcast for entertainment.

It is a remarkable spectrum of terror.

I was like, let me see if Jim and EL cats will want to do a, uh, Q and a, so we did a Q and a as well.

And this has precedence because this is what I did with Paul Tremblay in the back of Volume 3 when those issues were coming out.

So we packed it full of new back matter that was in-universe.

So we have a two-gun common cartoon drawn by Billy and Randy and regular back matter.

What else do you have on your stack? So keeping in the theme of I've never read from these authors before, but I probably should have.

I also read my first Paul Tremblay and I read Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep.

And the interesting thing around this book is It's being marketed as sci-fi and not horror, which is what Paul Tremblay has been known for.

I'm going to argue it's a sci-fi horror because I was horrified the entire time I was reading it.

And mostly unsettled is how I would describe how I felt because this book is very much a conversation about AI and where AI could go because this woman is… gets a job and she is told all she has to do is escort this man across the country.

On the flip side, you have M.

Night Shyamalan's recent film Knock at the Cabin, which is based on Paul Tremblay's novel The Cabin at the End of the World.

If you read the novel, it violently kills a young child in a deeply traumatic, accidental way halfway through the story.

Shyamalan fundamentally changed the ending of the movie to save the child for reasons almost identical to Dee Wallace's argument for Cujo.