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Dark Places

by Gillian Flynn

Other authors: See the other authors section.

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
8,2324061,004 (3.84)283
Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. Thriller. HTML:NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl, and the basis for the major motion picture starring Charlize Theron

Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in “The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas.” She survived—and famously testified that her fifteen-year-old brother, Ben, was the killer. Twenty-five years later, the Kill Club—a secret society obsessed with notorious crimes—locates Libby and pumps her for details. They hope to discover proof that may free Ben.
Libby hopes to turn a profit off her tragic history: She’ll reconnect with the players from that night and report her findings to the club—for a fee. As Libby’s search takes her from shabby Missouri strip clubs to abandoned Oklahoma tourist towns, the unimaginable truth emerges, and Libby finds herself right back where she started—on the run from a killer.
Praise for Dark Places
“[A] nerve-fraying thriller.”The New York Times
“Flynn’s well-paced story deftly shows the fallibility of memory and the lies a child tells herself to get through a trauma.”The New Yorker

“Gillian Flynn coolly demolished the notion that little girls are made of sugar and spice in Sharp Objects, her sensuous and chilling first thriller. In Dark Places, her equally sensuous and chilling follow-up, Flynn . . . has conjured up a whole new crew of feral and troubled young females. . . . [A] propulsive and twisty mystery.”Entertainment Weekly
“Flynn follows her deliciously creepy Sharp Objects with another dark tale . . . The story, alternating between the 1985 murders and the present, has a tense momentum that works beautifully. And when the truth emerges, it’s so macabre not even twisted little Libby Day could see it coming.”People (4 stars)
“Crackles with peevish energy and corrosive wit.” —Dallas Morning News
“A riveting tale of true horror by a writer who has all the gifts to pull it off.”Chicago Tribune

"It's Flynn's gift that she can make a caustic, self-loathing, unpleasant protagonist someone you come to root for.”New York Magazine
“[A] gripping thriller.”—Cosmopolitan
"Gillian Flynn is the real deal, a sharp, acerbic, and compelling storyteller with a knack for the macabre.”—Stephen King.
… (more)
  1. 82
    Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane (kraaivrouw)
  2. 50
    In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (Anonymous user)
    Anonymous user: Dark Places was undoubtedly influenced by In Cold Blood, but brings an interesting form of storytelling to superficially similar plot lines.
  3. 51
    Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (becksdakex)
  4. 40
    Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (sturlington)
  5. 10
    A Field of Darkness by Cornelia Read (RidgewayGirl)
    RidgewayGirl: A similarly troubled protagonist and an equally tensely-plotted and well written mystery.
  6. 00
    The Fault Tree by Louise Ure (RidgewayGirl)
  7. 00
    Every Dead Thing by John Connolly (kraaivrouw)
  8. 00
    Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight (BookshelfMonstrosity)
    BookshelfMonstrosity: These intricately plotted, fast paced and suspenseful murder mysteries feature young women struggling with dark family secrets and intense drama. Both expertly switch between past and present to slowly reveal disturbing truths.
  9. 12
    Salem Falls by Jodi Picoult (VictoriaPL)
  10. 01
    The Sick Rose by Erin Kelly (amyblue)
    amyblue: Both books have a strong sense of place, compelling main characters and involve both a present day and a past story. Also both are very intricately plotted thrillers.
  11. 12
    In the Woods by Tana French (BookshelfMonstrosity)
    BookshelfMonstrosity: These psychological suspense novels feature characters who, as young children, witness horrible crimes and must now revisit their painful pasts to discover the truth. The stories are fast paced, chilling, and atmospheric.
  12. 14
    The Secret History by Donna Tartt (SomeGuyInVirginia)
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» See also 283 mentions

English (393)  Dutch (5)  German (2)  French (2)  Spanish (1)  Catalan (1)  Danish (1)  Italian (1)  All languages (406)
Showing 1-5 of 393 (next | show all)
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. ( )
  jskeltz | Nov 23, 2023 |
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 ( )
  Elizabeth_Cooper | Oct 27, 2023 |
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. ( )
  settingshadow | Aug 19, 2023 |
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! ( )
  Briars_Reviews | Aug 4, 2023 |
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. ( )
  quondame | Jul 28, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 393 (next | show all)
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» Add other authors (5 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Gillian Flynnprimary authorall editionscalculated
Campbell, CassandraNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Deakins, MarkNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Dean, RobertsonNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Dean, RobertsonNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Lowman, RebeccaNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Lyytinen, MariaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
The Days were a clan that mighta lived long, But Ben Day's head got screwed on wrong, That boy craved dark Satan's power, So he killed his family in one nasty hour, Little Michelle he strangled in the night, Then chopped up Debby: a bloody sight, Mother Patty he saved for last, Blew off her head with a shotgun blast, Baby Libby somehow survived, But to live through that ain't much a life --Schoolyard Rhyme, circa 1985
Dedication
To my dashing husband, Brett Nolan
First words
I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ.
Quotations
“I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it. It’s the Day blood. Something’s wrong with it. I was never a good little girl, and I got worse after the murders.”
“I was not a lovable child, and I’d grown into a deeply unlovable adult. Draw a picture of my soul, and it’d be a scribble with fangs.”
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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Information from the Italian Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language.
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Wikipedia in English (1)

Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. Thriller. HTML:NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl, and the basis for the major motion picture starring Charlize Theron

Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in “The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas.” She survived—and famously testified that her fifteen-year-old brother, Ben, was the killer. Twenty-five years later, the Kill Club—a secret society obsessed with notorious crimes—locates Libby and pumps her for details. They hope to discover proof that may free Ben.
Libby hopes to turn a profit off her tragic history: She’ll reconnect with the players from that night and report her findings to the club—for a fee. As Libby’s search takes her from shabby Missouri strip clubs to abandoned Oklahoma tourist towns, the unimaginable truth emerges, and Libby finds herself right back where she started—on the run from a killer.
Praise for Dark Places
“[A] nerve-fraying thriller.”The New York Times
“Flynn’s well-paced story deftly shows the fallibility of memory and the lies a child tells herself to get through a trauma.”The New Yorker

“Gillian Flynn coolly demolished the notion that little girls are made of sugar and spice in Sharp Objects, her sensuous and chilling first thriller. In Dark Places, her equally sensuous and chilling follow-up, Flynn . . . has conjured up a whole new crew of feral and troubled young females. . . . [A] propulsive and twisty mystery.”Entertainment Weekly
“Flynn follows her deliciously creepy Sharp Objects with another dark tale . . . The story, alternating between the 1985 murders and the present, has a tense momentum that works beautifully. And when the truth emerges, it’s so macabre not even twisted little Libby Day could see it coming.”People (4 stars)
“Crackles with peevish energy and corrosive wit.” —Dallas Morning News
“A riveting tale of true horror by a writer who has all the gifts to pull it off.”Chicago Tribune

"It's Flynn's gift that she can make a caustic, self-loathing, unpleasant protagonist someone you come to root for.”New York Magazine
“[A] gripping thriller.”—Cosmopolitan
"Gillian Flynn is the real deal, a sharp, acerbic, and compelling storyteller with a knack for the macabre.”—Stephen King.

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Libby Day, still haunted by the day she witnessed the murder of her family on their farm in Kinnakee, Kansas, and twenty-five-years after testifying that her fifteen-year-old brother Ben was the killer, Libby is contacted by the Kill Club and devises a money making scheme that leads her back into a killer's path.
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