Gillian Flynn

Another extremely fast read for me, Gillian Flynn manages to make the deeply unpalatable, the horribly unpleasant and the simply unlikable into something compulsively, even easily, readable.

Decades after the horrific massacre of her mother and sisters, Libby Day's fund of donated money runs out and she finds herself taking money from a group of True Crime aficionados to investigate aspects of her own case, forcing herself to unwillingly confront a history she has not hitherto had the show more strength or the will to consciously think about. Almost immediately, doubt is cast on the guilt of the convicted perpetrator that her own testimony helped put behind bars: her brother Ben. Meanwhile, the narrative divides to follow Ben and Patty, their mother, on the fateful day before the murders.

Stephen King's blurb praises Flynn's gift for the macabre, but the horrors of Dark Places are all pretty much real. The widespread Satanism and pedophile-ring scares that destroyed countless lives and the grinding poverty that ultimately proves to be the real villain of this whodunnit. As the day goes on and the ugliness worsens with every hour, they close like a trap around the doomed family, while years later the survivor struggles with the appalling damage done to her psyche and her personality. show less

Gillian Flynn’s first novel, Sharp Objects, may not be quite as twisty as her wildly-popular Gone Girl, but it’s definitely full of nasty surprises, perverted motives, and outright evil. Perceptive readers will pick up on part of the secret fairly quickly; others will come, sooner or later, to the same conclusion at which protagonist Camille Preaker reluctantly arrives: You’re crazy to think what you’re thinking. You’re crazy not to think it.

Preaker, a somewhat less than brilliant show more reporter on a second-class Chicago daily, is sent to her suitably parochial Missouri hometown where the murder of two young girls in less than nine months has townspeople nervous and law enforcement in over their heads. Preaker’s editor sees an overlooked story that just might vault his struggling paper into prominence, and thinks the young woman’s local connections will help her dig out the details of the investigation. What the editor doesn’t understand, and what Preaker is too emotionally fragile to tell him, is that she has been estranged from her family for years, and that being plunged back into the emotional morass of a town where everyone knows – or thinks they know – everyone else’s business, is a living nightmare for her.

Flynn has drawn some of the nastiest fictional characters ever to slither around a suspense novel, including a quartet of middle-school girls teetering between sexual promiscuity and mean-girl bullying, a mother figure straight out of hell, and a protagonist with a wheelbarrow full of kinks – sexual and otherwise. It’s a horror scenario the reader can barely stand to watch, yet barely manage to put down. show less

Sharp Objects dives beneath the lacquered veneer of a small town and discovers a truly creepy, deranged Southern Gothic. The lawns are lush, the hands are manicured, but underneath it is rotten to the core.

Camille Preaker is the exceptionally damaged journalist who returns to the dysfunctional community of her childhood to investigate a series of gruesome child murders. You know there's no hope for her, in fact, you wonder if she'll even make it out alive, but you can't help hoping that if show more anyone can unmask the sickness, it's her. Camille takes us on a roller-coast ride through a lifetime of violence and she does not disappoint.

If you thought We Need to Talk About Kevin (the book - I have no idea about the quality of the film) was compelling, disturbing, and memorable you'll definitely enjoy Sharp Objects. show less

From the start, I loved Gillian Flynn's gritty style and broken characters who set the stage for gristly murders. The atmosphere is perfectly cloying, sickly-sweet and depraved where love is thwarted to disease. I thought I had it figured out early in the book, gripped by the inevitable denouement. But I was wrong. It's a great read, beautifully crafted and a suspense until the end.