KEY POINTS:
While she waits to see what Kiwi filmmaker Peter Jackson will make of The Lovely Bones, her smash-hit first novel about a murdered child, American writer Alice Sebold has been quietly working away on the next.
Second novels are notoriously difficult especially for an author with such a stellar start. Reviewers seem determined to be disappointed and readers want a slightly altered version of what went before. So in many ways Sebold's The Almost Moon is her bravest piece of writing yet.
About a woman who suffocates her mother, the story unfolds over 24 hours as the daughter Helen Knightly blunders about trying to cover up her crime.
At first her motives seem straightforward - the 88-year-old mother has dementia, has soiled herself and hospice care is the only other option. It could be a crime of compassion, but then Sebold reaches into the past and things become more complicated. Gradually she pieces together a picture of a spectacularly dysfunctional suburban family. Knightly's life has been hellish with an agoraphobic, wildly unstable and domineering mother and a charming but quietly suffering mentally ill father. Unsurprisingly Knightly has stuffed up pretty much all of her adult relationships and now, alone, she is trapped, supporting herself by posing naked as an artist's model and tending the mother she both hates and loves.
The story is relentlessly, unapologetically bleak.
So does Sebold need to lighten up? Readers of her first book, the autobiographical Lucky, won't find it difficult to pinpoint the reasons she can't. Lucky is the story of the brutal rape Sebold survived as a young student - a violation she took a few steps further and turned into The Lovely Bones.
Similarly, she appears to have used her own family as the foundation for The Almost Moon. Her mother was an alcoholic prone to severe panic attacks, her father lived his real-life somewhere else. Both were reluctant to be involved during Sebold's prolonged and traumatic bid to bring her rapist to justice.
Neither came close to being as disturbed or monstrous as Knightly's family but you can imagine the day she gave this book to her parents to read must have been fairly nerve-wracking for Sebold.
In early interviews she implied her new novel had no autobiographical basis. That's hard to believe. In Lucky Sebold describes her young self as always having to be the strong one in her family. In The Almost Moon the young Knightly has to be tough enough to hold a lynch mob of neighbours at bay after her mother has failed to help a dying child. The parallels are dressed up and turned around but still too obvious to miss.
Sebold (45) mines topics that bother people and The Almost Moon is the most bothersome of all. Despite its grim plot, best-seller The Lovely Bones has a surreal beauty and lightness, plus an element of mystery - we know who the perpetrator is but will he ever get caught? The Almost Moon has none of that.
Sebold hasn't pandered to her first novel fans by giving them what she thinks they want.
This book is uncompromising, brilliant and disturbing. I doubt Peter Jackson will make a movie of this one.
- Detours, HoS
