There’s a lot of gross scenes in A Head Full of Ghosts. Marjorie oozes green slime out of her mouth onto her spaghetti, urinates and defecates on the floor, bleeds on the bed, and practically bites a man’s arm off. Any number of these gory scenes, or ones like it, could have been connected to the death of Merry’s family.
But poison? What an interesting choice. Especially potassium cyanide, a poison that in the book kills quickly and without much apparent gory side effects. According to the CDC, potassium cyanide is typically odorless, ships in easy tablets or pellets, and is rapidly fatal – so, at least in this part of the novel, the information is accurate.
What is so surprising to me is the lack of gore involved. Merry’s family twitch and convulse for a brief time and then collapse dead to the ground – no oozing, bleeding, gushing, bursting – no nothing. Merry even keeps asking Marjorie when she is going to wake up after she has already fallen to the floor dead, perhaps because she still looks so normal she could just be sleeping.
After the gruesome deaths and moments in The Exorcist, including people being thrown out of high windows and splattering on the ground below with their necks turned 180 degrees, I expected a more dramatic ending for the three other members of the Barrett family. In that sense, the poison was an anticlimax for me, as I had been expecting from reading the book that the moments when the whole family was together, things often became disgusting, but not the case here. On the other hand, because I was not anticipating the poison, it was also quite a plot twist, ending that plot line much different than I thought it would.
Of all the ways that Marjorie, the mom, and the dad could have died, I wasn’t expecting poison to be one of them. Compared to a demon possessing you, poison seems almost laughable.