Imagine a literary horror novel that riffs on one of the best and creepiest short stories out there, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper: “It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!” Then throw in elements of every tale of possession you’ve read or seen, from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House to William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, and you’ll end up with Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, one of the most frightening books I’ve read this, or any, year.

Tremblay’s story, winner of a Bram Stoker award in the US, is told in layer upon layer. Merry – Meredith Barrett – is a 23-year-old woman telling an author about her childhood – how when she was eight, her 14-year-old sister Marjorie suffered a psychotic break, behaving as if she were possessed by a host of spirits. There are multitudes of voices, strange languages and impossible knowledge. Marjorie tells her little sister terrifying stories: “I’ll keep your tongue and put it on a string, wear it like a necklace, keep it close against my chest, let it taste my skin until it turns black and shrivels up like all dead things do.” At one point Marjorie is found in her bedroom “clinging to the wall like a spider”, her arms and legs “spread-eagled, with her hands, wrists, feet, and ankles sunk into the wall as though it were slowly absorbing her”.

None of our narrators here, adult or child Merry, or the blogger, who has secrets of her own, are remotely reliable

The Barretts, broke and desperate, Marjorie’s Catholic father believing in a possession, her mother dealing with the situation by dragging her to psychiatrists, agree to their family being filmed for a reality television show, The Possession, which culminates in an exorcism. Fifteen years later, Merry is reliving the events, and their catastrophic conclusion, for a book the author is writing. “What I remember … is kind of foggy, and um, loose … Loose. It’s all there, I believe, but difficult to gather and keep together. Like trying to scoop up and hold a thousand pennies in my hands at once.”

Horror blogger Karen Brissette, meanwhile, is picking her way through the episodes of The Possession for her blog The Last Final Girl, pondering, as she does so, “how a family would possibly consider allowing a network to broadcast their living nightmare: a teenage daughter going through a particularly nasty, devastating psychotic break, while believing (or pretending, yeah?) she was possessed by a demon, and a stereotypical one at that”.

Sly and funny, Brissette unravels the strands of popular culture that are part of Marjorie’s “stereotypical” possession, from The Blair Witch Project to Lovecraft, Nabokov, Gilman, and Jackson, again. Tremblay dedicates the book to the latter, and his heroine’s story – even her name – are, perhaps most of all, a subtle play on Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, narrated by Merricat.

Despite the skill with which Tremblay wields his demons, real or otherwise, whether or not Marjorie is actually possessed ends up not being the point of A Head Full of Ghosts. None of our narrators here, adult or child Merry (a brilliantly-realised eight-year-old girl), or the blogger, who has secrets of her own, are remotely reliable, and Tremblay is elegantly, carefully ambiguous about the situation. But wherever it comes from, there’s real evil at the heart of this book – and just in time for Halloween.

A Head Full of Ghosts is published by Titan (£7.99). Click here to buy it for £6.55