Isabella Moon
by Laura Benedict

Release Date: 7th Feb 2008
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 978 0 434 01704 1
RRP: £12.99

This is unquestionable one of the most surreal books I have read in a long time and I can only assume that that is the author’s intention.

Full of disturbed people with irrational and erratic behaviour, it somehow grips you from behind and thrusts you headlong into a strange story of bizarre dreams where the dead show you where their body is hidden, husbands who have you beaten for being pregnant and cokehead bosses who try to mow you down with their 4x4.

It doesn’t start off well and there seems very little going on for quite some time. Admittedly, Kate has experienced her paranormal dream and gone to the local sheriff to inform him (which is odd behaviour, but not necessarily compelling reading). No, the book really gets going when Lillian (the mother of Kate’s only friend, Francie) is brutally murdered – hit over the head and speared through like a fish with a pitch fork – in her own back garden. The fact that Lillian is the only other soul who has witnessed paranormal activity at the place where Kate believes Isabella Moon’s body to be buried, only causes more trouble in Kate’s already tumultuous mind... and the sheriff’s.

The complexity of this story, with the rampant sex lives of all involved, drug taking and manufacturing, oddball families with messed up relationships and at the epicentre a woman called Kate who claims to see the very much dead, Isabella Moon – it all works, in a rather quirky, atypical and utterly anomalous way. Don’t ask me to explain how or why. It just does.

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