There is nothing quite as eerie and laced with danger as growing up a girl. Even if you don’t realize it yourself at the time, the world around you will let you know by treating you with equal parts ridicule and fear. And I am not only talking about the dangers that lurk on the internet, or is hidden in dark back alleys, but the kind that stirs to life in the mind, where childhood imagination and powerful feelings clash with cataclysmic consequences, at least for the girl herself.
Society has always been afraid of developing girls: their intensity and seemingly irrational actions. On their way to adulthood, they might even become defiant and refuse to be controlled. Maybe that is why books and movies so often make a connection between young women, possessions, and hauntings. I make the connection myself in the novel The Temptation of Charlotte North, where a violent and insidious poltergeist turns a young woman into the center of its universe, not entirely against her will.
Here are some other novels that explore this theme in surprising, insightful, and interesting ways.
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Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts
In this novel the normal and the paranormal are perfectly balanced, as it plays with themes like perception and faith. One thing is for sure: the Barret family at the heart of the story is in crisis. Their oldest daughter, Marjorie, displays disturbing behavior, and no one can figure out what is wrong with her. Soon, a Catholic priest gets involved, and then a reality TV show that wants to record the ongoing possession—if that is what it is.
Fifteen years later, a writer approaches Marjorie’s younger sister, Merry, to get her side of the story, bringing up old memories and questions about what actually happened back then. The most important ones being: was Marjorie really possessed by something other than her own mind, and, if this was a psychological issue, did the world around her make the illness worse?
What I particularly like about this book—besides young Merry’s amazing voice—are the many nods to classic real-world cases, and how the reality show becomes a monster in its own right, haunting the family and blurring the lines between the real and the invented.
Daisy Pearce, Something in the Walls
This book does a great job of linking symptoms of supernatural possession to trauma. There is indeed something in the bedroom walls of thirteen-year-old Alice, though maybe not what child psychologist Mina expects when she comes to assess her. The book starts out as a classic poltergeist haunting—though by a witch rather than a demon—then takes a nifty folk horror turn, complete with a superstitious village and creepy old rituals.
The novel shows some of the many ways that girls can be possessed: by faith, bad agents, and, eventually, their own minds. The novel is set during a heat wave, which makes it feel like a fever dream. I particularly like the connection made between the haunting and witchcraft, another supernatural phenomenon that—at least in our society—is female coded.
Grady Hendrix, My Best Friend’s Exorcism
This book exists on the campy side of the spectrum, and is crammed with 80’s nostalgia, teen angst, and the intense power of adolescent friendships. At the center are Abby and Gretchen, who are inseparable until Gretchen starts acting strange, and Abby—influenced by the 80s “satanic panic”—decides that her friend is demon possessed. The story follows Abby’s attempt to save Gretchen, while also prodding at the question of how real the possession is.
My Best Friend’s Exorcism has some amazing over the top characters, lots of heart, and a propulsive plot. It is also very, very funny.
Christi Nogle, Beulah
This is one of my all-time favorite ghost stories, because of how it blends the eerie and thorny state of adolescence with creeping dread and genuine chills. Georgie’s family is down on their luck and move to the small town of Beulah, Idaho, to flip an old haunted schoolhouse. Georgie, unfortunately, can see dead people, and things take a gnarly turn.
The schoolhouse teems with past students, and there is a menacing shadow lurking in the basement. The town of Beulah has other ghosts as well, and none of them are there just to bother the living. They want something, and therein lies the problem.
I think what makes this book so impactful is the way it blurs the boundaries between reality and the shadow world. A lot of stories do that, but this one does it particularly well. Georgie is also no damsel in distress; she is a prickly person, and difficult in a strangely relatable way. There is also a good dash of hard reality here, not just in the way Beulah and Georgie are portrayed, but also how the world works.
Gwendolyn Kiste, The Haunting of Velkwood
In this novel, the trope is turned on its head, in that it is adolescence that haunts our protagonist, Talitha, rather than her being haunted in adolescence. One day, the street she grew up on ceases to exists in any normal sense, and becomes a shimmering, not-real place, while the people who were there when it happened are frozen in time, trapped behind the veil, like ghosts.
Only Talitha and her former best friends, who made a narrow escape, can enter the ghostly street, but they have not wanted to do so for a very long time. Then Talitha is presented with the right incentive, and joins a group of scientists eager to solve the Velkwood-mystery. Going back is hard though, for many reasons. Not only is it dangerous enough in itself, but the trauma left behind is still there as well.
This story raises some interesting questions about how we are haunted by our pasts, and sometimes even held back because of it. Nothing is quite as terrifying as looking your old self in the eye, and reckoning with where things went wrong.
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