Tantrum

This heavy-handed horror novel from Moulton (The Insatiable Volt Sisters) introduces Thea, a deeply unhappy young mother who’s anxious about her toddler daughter, Lucia, a child with an unnatural number of teeth and a malevolent aura. Convinced she’s given birth to a monster, Thea frets about what to do even as her increasingly surreal struggle to parent Lucia awakens repressed memories of her own abusive childhood. The novel is at its most successful when it’s tightly focused on Thea’s personal struggles, but Moulton’s prose unfortunately veers wildly from somewhat generic domestic drama into confusing, phantasmagoric dream sequences that provide harrowing imagery, but add little to the overarching plot. Similarly unsuccessful are the attempts to generalize Thea’s experiences to make clunky statements about motherhood and gender. Thea herself makes for a deeply unpleasant narrator, with much of the novel’s attempts at humor coming from her cruel one-liners, and the supporting cast is thinly sketched. It’s a disappointment. Agent: Kim Witherspoon, InkWell Management. (Aug.)