Sealed starts promisingly, with a portentous warning that the narrator is telling a story long after things have gone wrong: I had many unanswered questions about cutis: how does the condition seal people up so quickly? Why didn’t they notice it happening until it was too late? Couldn’t they move their mouths around to stop the edges joining? Where did those edges come from? The pathology was never entirely believable. I had to suspend my disbelief in parts, in order to remain caught up in the story. As the book develops, Pete’s lack of concern seems strange, and harder to dismiss as a natural extension of his happy-go-lucky personality. Is Alice right, or is she hysterical? Or, is the very idea that she might be hysterical just the kind of sexist, dismissive nonsense that is angering Alice in the first place?īooth does a good job of making us question both Alice’s world and our own reactions to it, even if she sometimes falters. But Pete and the other residents of their new home town seem more worried about keeping Alice quiet. Their move to the countryside is just as much an attempt to escape her delusions as an attempt to find safety. Alice has been obsessively recording cutis cases, convinced her mother was killed by it, despite the medical authorities’ claims to the contrary. She has become convinced that unknown pollutants are causing outbreaks of “cutis”, a condition that causes people to be sealed up in their own skin, as it grows over their eyes, ears, mouths and noses until they choke. When she sees a barbecue, she focuses on the blackening meat: “hydrocarbons totally fucking poisonous.” She doesn’t believe there is a real human growing inside her: “Instead I picture fossils, the strange curved bones of ancient reptiles patterned inside soft mudstone.” There are plenty of strange things going on in her head, even without the dangers building up around her.Īlice and her boyfriend Pete have moved to a fictional town in Australia’s Blue Mountains, to get out of Sydney. Alice’s senses are heightened, as is her sense of danger.

Sealed by Naomi Booth