On Dec. 6, 1973, a 14 year old girl was abused and murdered in a Norristown, Pennsylvania cornfield. At a barbecue in early 2000s Melbourne, a man slaps a misbehaving child who is not related to him. These events may not be comparable in terms of scale, but they instigate the plots of two novels that shed light on how the pressures of suburban life can damage one’s psyche and ability to connect with others. Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap have fundamentally different settings, characters and themes. But both have conflicts that can be tied back to the communities the main characters live in. This is a testament to a thematic web in fiction that I call “suburban horror.”

From the time of its creation, horror is used to reflect dominant societal fears. Examples such as Scream and Night of the Living Dead have been said by some to reflect the horrors of the time, including racial brutality and exposure to daily violence – despite the setting of a seemingly peaceful suburban neighborhood.

In the case of the novels in question, the authors had personal investment in the larger societal horrors they address. Sebold was attacked and abused at age eighteen while walking to her college dorm, and Tsiolkas, as a gay child of Greek immigrants, experienced much of the racism and homophobia that is presented in The Slap. For both novels, their setting in modern, average and somewhat remote neighborhoods is key in conveying themes surrounding the gradual erosion of safety and how our relationships with others affect our psyche.

The Lovely Bones has been used as an example of a modern sub genre called post-feminist gothic. Professor of English and Women's Studies Sarah Whitney describes the sub genre as “a powerful but under acknowledged strain of American women’s fiction that shows gendered violence and pain … emphasizing women’s disempowerment.” By centering female voices, the piece establishes exactly what power is being undermined. In The Lovely Bones, that power comes from assumptions about safety and innocence that are integral to the fabric of suburbia. Everybody is neighbourly and trustworthy, until a serial killer abuses and murders a teenage girl. She describes being gagged and tortured in graphic detail. “I felt the corners of my body were turning in on themselves and out, like in cat’s cradle, which I played with [my sister] just to make her happy” — all symbols of a childhood that is now corrupted forever.

The Slap also uses violence to subvert expectations of safety in suburbia, but Tsiolkas expresses a very different message from Sebold’s feminist elegy: the meteoric rise and moral bankruptcy of the Australian middle class. The book is written from the perspective of eight characters who were present at the barbecue where a child was slapped. All of them are victims or perpetrators — and frequently both — of violence. Even the language itself is violent in The Slap, with swear words and graphic scenes that are constant to the point of being disturbing.

The characters are all unlikeable to some degree, which turn some reviewers off, but I think that Tsiolkas tried to add complexity into each of the characters’ situations. Rosie — the mother of the slapped child — is obnoxious and spoils her son rotten, but the reader learns that her cloying devotion has roots in a severe episode of postpartum depression after his birth. We get a window into the slapper Harry’s insecurities about his working-class background and fear of losing the life he has built for himself, despite him being racist, sexist and abusive. The only certainty within each character is that they have a dark streak that becomes visible at intriguing – and telling times. The characters are neighbors and friends, but when something disturbs the bubble that they exist in, they turn on each other easily.

Both novels use their insular and familiar settings to explore the effects of trauma on groups and individuals. The Lovely Bones does so by using the aftermath of Susie Salmon’s murder to explore the loneliness of grief. This is primarily shown in how other characters experience Susie’s death. Lindsey, her younger sister, becomes estranged from her classmates because nobody knows how to interact with her after her sister’s murder, especially since the two look alike. “When people looked at Lindsey … they saw me,” says Susie.

On the other hand, The Slap demonstrates the selfishness and bigotry that arises when people with strong personalities and different ways of life conflict. The most tense moments in the novel are centered around confrontations, whether they are extraordinary events like the slap itself, or mundane moments such as an elderly Greek man being accidentally shoved by a young couple. These moments are all given weight because the threat of conflict is always present, and that threat usually reveals something about the characters. When the Greek man, Manolis, is bumped into, he sees it as a sign of disrespect and has to come to terms with ageing in a world where “[young people] … had not learned the meaning of honour, of respect.” When Richie, a gay teenager, sees one of the other characters in a gym locker room, his internalized homophobia is brought into focus, which goes on to influence some pivotal choices that he makes. The Slap conditions its readers to never expect the next eruption, invoking how all eight characters feel. They are constantly trapped in situations with people they don’t want to see.

In a rare moment of optimism in The Lovely Bones, everyone in the town comes to the site of the murder to pay respects to Susie. They initially do not invite her family for fear of offending them, but when her father sees what is happening and comes, everybody sings one of her favorite songs together. There is healing in recognition and togetherness, whereas the only time when all the characters in The Slap are together is at the beginning of the book — when the slap happens and everybody’s lives are overturned.

Both books reveal different sides of the same coin of suburban life. Here, nothing is safe, you are more alone than you think you are and your neighbors can provide either comfort or danger at any given moment. One could say that Sebold’s personal hell is being alone, while for Tsiolkas, hell is other people.