As Halloween approaches, the mind inevitably turns to costumes, candy, and of course ghost stories. It is with no morbid irony, though, that thoughts turn to Alice Sebold. Don’t be fooled by her NPR-ready voice; Sebold, whose first fiction piece The Lovely Bones revived the omniscient narrator and allowed the event of a rape/murder to take a backseat to the familial devastation left in its wake (the film version’s due in 2008), comes to present her latest novel The Almost Moon, which shifts the narrative from the victim to the victimizer. Where before she haunted us with the ghosts of her past or the melancholy of youth peering down at us from a not-so-perfect heaven, Sebold’s recursive inclination to tread down the murky path of headline realism once again takes the reader toward a new understanding of familial bonds, undoubtedly embracing the same casual sense of the macabre.

Fri., Oct. 26, 7 p.m., 2007