ALICE SEBOLD'S MEMOIR Lucky and her novel The Lovely Bones both explored the impact of violence upon its victim. Her new novel reveals a reversal of viewpoint from the first sentence: “When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.”

Sebold's narrator, Helen Knightley, has been enmeshed with her mother all her life. She hungers for her mother's love while being devoured by rage and bitterness at the devastating effect of Clair Knightley's mental illness on her own childhood. Quite apart from her agoraphobia and Alzheimer's, Clair is no easy parent. She is beautiful but thwarted, doted upon by her husband and often cruelly dismissive of her daughter despite her dependence on this only child.

Helen becomes incapable of moving far beyond her mother's destructive but addictive presence. Their dance of love and hatred continues behind closed doors even now that mother is 88 and daughter almost 50.

The reader's understanding of Clair is, however, filtered through an eloquently unreliable narrator. Helen seizes power by telling her story in her own way, forcing it through her own angry consciousness and colouring it with her sometimes startling assumptions. In most families there is an unspoken struggle to control the past by memory-telling and story-keeping. Each member has a partial and passionately held view, but with luck the range prevents any one becoming dominant.

Helen Knightley, however, has no one to challenge her version of the past. Her father is dead, and she has no sibling. She stops her mother's mouth with soft towels, smothering her and breaking her nose in the process, then degrades her corpse. She washes her mother's body, giving her a pedicure with the rough side of the pan-scrubber. She exposes her genitals and washes them in scalding water, then drags the corpse down to the basement. At this point Helen realises that she cannot put her mother's body in the meat freezer without chopping it up, so abandons the idea. Instead, she chops off the long braided hair that her father loved, and puts it in a freezer bag.

This unrelenting physical detail recalls Sebold's account of her own rape and near-murder in Lucky, but the effect is very different. Alice, in the cruellest and most vulnerable circumstances, fights to outwit her attacker by staying alive. Alice's humanity, her desperate individuality, make the narrative soar as it depicts the assault without flinching.

Clair Knightley is permitted no such resonance by her narrator-daughter. The murder celebrates her daughter's need to see her mother as a thing rather than as a woman with whom her relationship is entirely — desperately — unresolved. There are hints of Sylvia Plath: Helen wears a formal pink wool dress when she loses her virginity to her artist husband, in an echo of the pink wool suit that Plath wore to marry Ted Hughes. The hatred within a consuming mother-daughter intimacy is also very Plathian.

Chapter by chapter, Sebold peels away the layers of her narrator's misery and self-deception, and creates an extended and sometimes blackly comic critique of a popular literary genre. Helen Knightley holds an almost hilariously complete hand of “misery memoir” cards, and her confidence that these will trump her mother's murder is one of the most sinister aspects of the characterisation.

Her father has killed himself; her mother's illness has made them social pariahs; Helen's marriage has failed. The Knightley family is unlucky in brilliantly extravagant fashion. Her father's childhood home is scheduled for drowning to create a new dam; her mother cannot hold a great-grandson without dropping him on the floor; a gang of vengeful neighbours advances on the teenage Helen, and one assaults her as payback for her mother's failure to help a boy struck by a car outside their house.

At the core of this novel Sebold asks a profoundly interesting question about Helen's failure to recognise the authenticity and inviolability of others. The murder is the most obvious example of this blindness, but there are many others. Her relationships with her children seem brittle and needy, her friendships break down when they conflict with what she wants. She is a sexual predator not because she is desirous but because she is numb to the effect that she has on others. When interviewed by the police, she tries to pin blame for the murder on a young man named Manny Zavros who ran errands for her mother.

Sebold writes brilliantly about the dangers of a narcissistic and victimised identity; about murderous self-pity and its overweening sense of entitlement. Helen Knightley is a character who makes the spine creep, and The Almost Moon is a mature, salutary and timely novel.

The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

Picador, £16.99; 291pp

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