In many ways, The Almost Moon belongs to a familiar species of American novel. The narrator is a divorced woman with grown-up daughters, a bit of a thing for her ex-husband and a difficult relationship with her mother. She hasn't made much of her life but it isn't a total disaster; she lives in a nice house in Pennsylvania and works as a life model at the local college. She likes one daughter more than the other, which is normal, and she doesn't worry too much about what's happening to her middle-aged body.

Ah yes, bodies: we don't get far into the novel before Helen has a really big problem, not with her own but her mother's. That's body as in corpse, and like most first-time matricides - I'm guessing here, not having any relevant experience myself - Helen doesn't have much idea what to do with it. The late Mrs Knightly's sudden departure from this earth follows an unpleasant episode in which she soils herself, to use a euphemism, and Helen spends absolutely ages getting her corpse into a presentable state.

There's a rather unfortunate incident with a neighbour's cat, and Helen considers putting Mom in the freezer before leaving her on the basement floor and heading off to visit her best friend. Discovering that Natalie is out on a date - without telling her! - there's not much for Helen to do but have sex with Natalie's son Hamish in the back of a car. She's known Hamish since he was a baby so it's kind of all right, and anyway it passes the time until Helen's former husband Jake, an ice sculptor with permanently cold hands, arrives from the other side of the country to discuss the increasingly pressing question of what to do with his former mother-in-law.

Alice Sebold's earlier novel The Lovely Bones was a huge bestseller narrated by a teenage girl who had been raped and murdered. From a weird supernatural realm in the sky, more like summer camp without bossy adults than heaven, she watched her family's search for her body and recorded in soap-opera detail the next few years of their lives. The tone of this truly appalling novel was upbeat in a way I associate with people who have an unshakeable belief in therapy and positive thinking, a sort of 'you may be dead but hey, things could be worse' view of the world. Hence, I suspect, its phenomenal success.

From a dead narrator to a homicidal one isn't a huge leap, especially if you have Sebold's limited emotional range as a novelist. When Helen kills her mother - and describing it as a mercy killing would be pushing it - the event triggers not so much remorse as a bout of self-obsessed introspection. During these passages of bog-standard Bildungsroman it's as though she's decamped into another novel altogether and the revelations about her dysfunctional childhood (Mom was mad, in case you haven't guessed) come thick and fast. Even the specifics of her mother's madness are unoriginal, expressed in terms of a femininity - a feminine mystique, one might say - too fragile to engage with the real world.

Like the earlier novel, this is a very dark subject handled in a bewilderingly inappropriate way. 'When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily' is the first line; the book has no moral centre that I could discern but it does have buckets of melodrama. It’s a fictional version of all those creepy memoirs of childhood abuse which dominate the bestseller lists, especially in the US, and ideal reading for fans of Dave Pelzer.

THE ALMOST MOON by Alice Sebold
Picador £16.99 pp291

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