This has been a very strange week. This is one of the first weeks I’ve spent where my main job(s) are all working from home, so Thanksgiving didn’t feel as much like a “break” from something as it usually does. I have very fond memories of the previous two Thanksgivings when I’ve devoured books during my breaks from work. In 2012 it was The Fault in Our Stars and Silver Linings Playbook. In 2013 it was Bridget Jones: Mad about the Boy and Fangirl (Fannnngirrrrrlllll!). This year I was obsessed with Dark Places by Gillian Flynn.
Flynn’s second novel, Dark Places takes you inside the mind of three people. First, the main narrator is Libby Day. As a child, Libby survived a massacre that took her two older sisters and mother away from her. Libby famously testified that her older brother, Ben, was the murderer. Now in her early thirties, Libby has no contact with Ben, who is in prison for life. Alternating the Libby chapters are chapters from Libby’s mother’s perspective and Ben’s perspective both weaving a timeline to that fateful day in 1985. Libby is broke, so when a macabre, morbid group called the Kill Club offers to pay her to investigate the murders, she reluctantly agrees. Libby’s journey in and out of certainty of what can never be known forms the central plot of the novel.
Gillian Flynn is brilliant. She just is. As with Gone Girl, Dark Places reveals its power in tiny coincidences that all add up. It is almost meta the way she writes. For example, sometimes present-day Libby would casually mention something that was a hint of a rumor of the scuttlebutt about the murders, some offhand remark that she didn’t half believe. Then in the next section say it was written from Ben’s perspective, would address that rumor that shows the foundation for it, whether it is true or has been twisted through the minds of people who want to gossip and pick apart a tragedy.
I also liked this book because of Flynn’s descriptions of the bleak American landscapes. We saw American culture in the heartlands–in Kansas–and saw the weirdos that that world attracted. She just nailed it. I would say that much in the way that Tana French (love Tana French) and her mysteries are intimately associated with Dublin and Elizabeth George’s mysteries with England, Gillian Flynn’s novels represent a fully realized America. They are stories that could not be set anywhere else. Furthermore, they stray away from the major cities, showing a part of the country that you don’t see in much contemporary American mystery/thriller writing.
Overall, bravo. Five stars.
