OK first the pros- I do have to say that this was written brilliantly. I really enjoyed flipping from character to character at different points of events and the pace of the details coming together. That being said, this was a bit far fetched. That much misunderstanding and damage and madness coming together in one time and place was a little too much too much to take seriously. Everything that I loved about Gone Girl was missing from this one. I was captivated enough by Gilliann Flynn's writing style to keep reading her books but I kind of wish I skipped this one. ( )

Gone Girl was one of my favorite books I read this year, so I picked up Dark Places with both excitement and a good dose of apprehension. In my experience, just because I love an author's book doesn't mean I'm going to love everything else she's ever written, and I was a little worried about Dark Places somehow tainting my experience of Gone Girl. And sure enough, just like I anticipated, I didn't love Dark Places. (I do, however, still adore Gone Girl - and I'm eager to read more books by Gillian Flynn.) As always, I was captivated by Flynn's writing style. There's something so dark and gritty about her voice, so perfectly suited to the kinds of twisted tales she tells. I'm always amazed by her ability to take unlikeable characters and make them deeply captivating. I was eager to see what happened to Libby, and get to the bottom of the mystery. Unfortunately, the mystery itself is where the book fell apart for me. I thought it dragged on too long, and when the revelation finally came, it felt contrived and almost entirely implausible. I was left with a ton of questions at the end, and Flynn did little to answer them in the short wrap-up after the big reveal. All in all though, I found it an interesting, engaging story that held my interest throughout. But the lack of payoff at the end left me a little disappointed ( )

After I read [b:Sharp Objects|66559|Sharp Objects|Gillian Flynn|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1423241485s/66559.jpg|3801], I wrote off Gillian Flynn. It's not that I didn't like Sharp Objects, but it was so unbelievably disturbing that I didn't feel like more. But then I came down with the Flu, and Dark Places was one click away on my computer, for free from the library, while everything else was in that horrible far away land known as Up Stairs, so...

The good news is that Dark Places is nowhere near as disturbing as Sharp Objects. The bad news? Well, terribly disturbing is what Gillian Flynn does best. In the absence of horribly disturbing, her work is pretty pedestrian. I worry that it may say bad things about me/society/violence on TV/etc. that I find a book about a mass murder of two children and their mother not that disturbing, but the fact of the matter is that it reads like any other murder mystery. It takes more than gore to make disturbing and Dark Places doesn't have anything else. It's a decent murder mystery, but really, nothing special.

Which is a shame: some of the themes really seem like unique things to feature in a novel, especially a genre novel. However, Flynn really tells-not-shows both of her favorite themes: children taking small actions with large consequences (which in an especially heavy handed sequence, one of the characters offers a soliloquy about after expositing that he had accidentally set a forest fire by playing with a lighter and making an analogy to the main character's testimony in a murder trial as a child); and satanic panic. Satanic panic is such a great topic for a book -- moral panics are fascinating, and satanic panic is clearly the best moral panic -- it's recent enough to be memorable to most readers, distant enough that almost no one believes in it anymore and bizarre enough that it's mind-boggling that anyone ever took it seriously. However, Flynn deals with it much as I did: she has characters literally parrot words like "Satanic panic" and discuss the ways in which people fall prone to moral panics, instead of ever showing any characters emotionally struggling with the issues, or coming to terms with the idea that they fell prey to a panic or anything like that. So the exploration of these great, deep themes is really shallow.

Finally, the characters in Dark Places are extremely sympathetic (with only one or two exceptions) -- mostly people dealt a really hard blow by life and trying their best to keep going anyway. Honestly, I prefer these sympathetic but damaged characters over the extremely unsympathetic characters that star in her other books, but I felt like they weren't flawed enough. For instance, Libby Day, who regals us with stories of how blackened her soul is and how she's too lazy to even get out of bed? She says these things but at every turn in the narrative, she bends over backwards to give people the benefit of the doubt, help others, and challenge her own weaknesses. So, yeah. I would have actually preferred her to start out more troubled and Flynn to actually depict the character growth. ( )

Gillian Flynn had another amazing hit with Dark Places. This novel, as I have heard, is the second book she read and it was one major step up from Sharp Objects. After reading and watching Gone Girl, I became hooked on Gillian Flynn and I needed more (and I still want more!).

Her writing is addictive, well planned and thought out, and an amazing read for those interested in mystery and crime.

This novel was much longer than Sharp Objects (her first novel), and I found that I did not guess the ending for this novel like I did her first. Her writing style is still in tact, but has clearly grown since her first novel.

I loved this book! I read it over and over as I tried to connect the dots of the mystery of who actually killed most of the Day family. I would suggest this novel to anyone who likes crime and mystery and a good read that will leave you hooked on every word.

There isn't much wrong with this novel, to be honest. There are some pieces of information I would have liked to know about certain characters (without giving away spoilers, the little girls who were associated with Ben. I would have liked to know about them as children and how they came up with their stories and what happened to them as adults. But, the information I wanted wasn't crucial to the story itself.). I would have liked to see what happened with Libby and Lyle, but that wasn't crucial to the story either.

Overall, I loved this book! I am begging for more Gillian Flynn right now!
Five out of five stars! ( )

Well, for spending a fair amount of time with a family associated folk I'd pay to avoid it wasn't too bad. The perfect storm of drastically bad choices, luck, and pure ill-willed assholes is more than a lot overwhelming and beyond believable but is well choreographed. Still, I hope my bad memory kicks in soon and I can forget all the images this book blasted into my head. ( )