A Quiet and Disturbing Read: A Review of The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold
¦
¦
by June Pulliam
¦
Sebold, Alice. ¦The Lovely Bones. ¦Boston: Little, Brown and Company,
2002. 328 p.
The Lovely Bones has been reviewed extensively, and many of you who have come to this site are already familiar with the general premise of the story, or have at least heard of the book. Nevertheless, I'd like to spend some time discussing Seybold's novel as a work of horror.
¦
The Lovely Bones begins by getting the novel's primary act of violence out of the way at once: on her way home from school, twelve year old Susie Salmon is raped and killed by a neighborhood pedophile. While the subject matter is typical of many a maniac novel, Seybold's treatment is anything but. Most narratives in this subgenre of horror focus on the maniac himself and his dementia, perhaps detailing further crimes before he is either caught by cunning police work (see Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs, for example), or lives to kill another day (as is the case with Poppy Z. Brite's graphic and disturbing Exquisite Corpse).¦ Sebold does devote some attention the mind of the killer and the failed attempts to catch him, but she mainly examines how the world is changed by her dead protagonist's absence from it. The Salmons never find Susie's body, and their grief and lack of closure in her disappearance completely transform the family. Meanwhile, Suzie can only observe from her otherworldly perch.
¦
The Lovely Bones is a "quiet" horror novel in that there is no massive body count or over the top mutilation of the victim.¦ In fact, Suzie's death is rendered more brutal in the small amount of space devoted to it.¦ It takes a dizzyingly small amount of time to snuff out a life that has taken twelve years to form. In a world of daily Amber alerts, and in my own city where not one, but two serial killers are currently murdering women unhampered by the efforts of local police, we have come to see this sort of predator as a "natural" part of our environment, occasionally shocking perhaps, but certainly not unexpected. But it is this very quiet brand of horror that makes The Lovely Bones so deeply disturbing.¦
¦
The Salmons fall apart as a family unit and later come together in predictable but painful-to-even-contemplate ways. The father becomes increasingly withdrawn, barely able to function at work. The mother simply leaves her family rather than endure the pain of any more close relationships. And the remaining Salmon siblings also attempt to compensate for Susie's absence. The second eldest child now attempts to be as good as possible--a perfect, and perhaps improved replacement of her sister. And the youngest child, an infant when his sister disappeared, rages that his family devotes so much energy to the departed Susie, denying him of what he believes to be his share of attention. And the all too human police, bound by the law and the limitations of their own knowledge at the time, try but fail to catch Susie's killer, or even locate her body, which lies interred in a safe at the bottom of a sink hole like some sort of grisly time capsule.
¦
The novel ends a decade later with a stranger finding Susie's charm bracelet, never knowing the item's significance. As Susie looks down from heaven to see this person holding one of her earthly possessions, she wishes him a long life, something she herself never had, underscoring perhaps the most frightening thing of all. Bad things happen to good people for no reason that we can comprehend, and worse still, bad people can go unpunished all their lives for their misdeeds. And our abilities to keep our families safe rely on luck as much as they do good planning. ¦This is far more disturbing that the idea that Hannibal Lecter may have for dinner our livers with fava beans and a good Chianti.
¦