Word: sebold
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...that makes The Lovely Bones the breakout fiction debut of the year - the sweetness, the humor, the kicky rhythm, the deadpan suburban gothic - is right there, packed into those first two lines, under pressure and waiting to explode. Part coming-of-age tale, part mystery, part ghost story, Alice Sebold's first novel (she's also the author of a memoir, Lucky) is the tale of an ordinary girl who is raped, murdered and dismembered in a field near her house. Three days later, a neighbor's dog comes trotting home with her elbow in its mouth. This is horror...
Part coming-of-age tale, part mystery, part ghost story, Alice Sebold's first novel (she's also the author of a memoir, Lucky) is the tale of an ordinary girl who is raped, murdered and dismembered in a field near her house. Three days later, a neighbor's dog comes trotting home with her elbow in its mouth. This is horror at its darkest and most tantalizing--a stiff cocktail of David Lynch and Judy Blume, served with a distinct chill--and as first chapters go, it's a knockout. The second chapter tops...
...Sebold knows what it is to be haunted. In 1981, as a freshman at Syracuse University, she was savagely beaten and raped by a stranger. The trauma left her with ghosts that needed exorcising, and it wasn't until 1996, after two earlier failed novels and half of a third, that inspiration finally arrived. She wrote the first 15 pages of The Lovely Bones in a single, unexpected rush that left her shaken. "It was one of those white-heat moments," Sebold remembers. But the struggle wasn't over. Two years into the novel she felt she had to take...
...other little girls lost whose faces haunt billboards and photocopied flyers and whose stories we play and replay obsessively on the 6 o'clock news. "Murder had a blood red door," Susie tells us, "on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone." In The Lovely Bones, Sebold takes us behind that red door; she imagines the unimaginable and in doing so reminds us that those missing girls aren't just tabloid icons or martyred innocents but real human beings who chewed gum and kissed boys and suffered and died. "Horror on Earth is real...
...took a long white envelope from his left sock. He handed over photographs and drawings of rifles and a mosquito boat. (Sebold, as impassive as Buster Keaton, thoughtfully turned the photographs toward the camera.) Duquesne, talking about guns and bombs, pantomimed aiming...