Dark Places by Gillian Flynn Review

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW

“The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty - we all have it.”- Dark Places, Gillian Flynn

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.

For the past few months, I've been test-driving, so to speak, popular thriller writers, looking for one that fits me. It's a yearly search at this point, and in the past I've both read and rejected writers like Paula Hawkins and Chevy Stevens before finding Tana French. However, in April, my search was reignited as I realized I only had two more of her books left and needed to find a new thriller writer I liked maybe not as much, but close enough to keep me happy until 2018, when hopefully the next Murder Squad book will be released. I've had some success so far with both Jilliane Hoffman and Robert Dugoni (though I haven't found the time yet to pick up more of their stuff) and some disappoints (see Megan Abbott and Laura Lippman), but despite purposefully searching out and reading some of the biggest names in the genre I still hadn't yet read a Gillian Flynn.

Well, that's not quite true. I did get about 20 pages into Gone Girl before losing the will to go on, but it occurred to me that perhaps Gone Girl wasn't the best Flynn novel to start with- the subject matter didn't even interest me all that much- and instead I should attempt a book whose subject content appealed to me more. Like Dark Places. 

So. Gillian Flynn, take two.

Unfortunately, with her I think the hype got to me. So many thriller lovers, many whose opinions I trust, adore her. And hell, a lot of thriller writers want to be her. I mean, after Gone Girl literally all a publisher had to do to sell a new thriller is put "for fans of Gone Girl" on it and boom, instant best seller. And everyone appears to love her other books too, calling them dark and gritty explorations into the deep minds of unlikable people. So I went into Dark Places expecting to be wowed by the fucking Monet of thrillers. I wanted greatness, dammit.

As predicted by my aborted Gone Girl reading experience, this book and I started out on a rough road as I was struggling to not let my mind wander off and was trying to get invested into the characters, to have them become real for me. After about an hour or two of reading, I was dismayed to discover just how little of this good sized (not large but by no means tiny) book I had actually read. My point is, it doesn't automatically hook you. Now, I don't mind it when contemporaries or historical fictions novels meander along at the beginning, but I demand it from my mysteries. The middle can drag a bit and I won't kill you, but the beginning has to catch you right from the get go, get you invested in the mystery so you don't just put it down early. This book, well, didn't. 

If I was Flynn, I would have started this book off the way the movie Capote did. I would have painted a picture of this cold winter's morning in this dying Kansas town and then zoomed in to this failing farm, where we, the readers, encounter the dead bodies of the wife and children. And I would have done likely through the eyes of Libby. I wouldn't have started it off with the children's song cliche, that's for damn sure.

Instead, we get introduced to Libby. From what I gather from my research into Gillian Flynn's writing (read: watched three Booktube videos that mention her, also read a Goodreads interview) her shtick is to write unlikable heroines. I'd probably like that idea more if she didn't frame it as a politically based decision, and instead admitted that she just wanted to write miserable bitches, but hey, at least she's doing it. And yes, I suppose Libby is pretty unlikable, but frankly I feel like I never really got to know her. I didn't get any insight into her dark and twisted mind, and it did feel like some of her negative personality traits- stealing, low temper- were tacked on because, again, Gillian Flynn's shtick demands it. But I did end up kind of liking Libby, liking her in the begrudging way I like characters that are so obviously characters, and I didn't mind living in her head for a bit.

The best character in the book, hands down, is Lyle. I found him endearing in a way I didn't expect to, kind of like a nervous, overexcited puppy. I especially liked that Libby ended up coming around to him and by the end of the book, they had a genuine friendship.

However, I was not thrilled with the rest of the characters. They were disappointingly cliche, something that, yes, I would have been annoyed at in any mystery writer, but in this case it came off almost like an insult. We have the martyr mother, the tough aunt, the deadbeat dad, the dick cop/loan guy. I expected more nuance from a thriller writer of this caliber. That being said, the women in the Free Day Society made me laugh, and I think I felt more sadness for Magda's son Ned than anyone else in the book put together.

I will say this, though, this book is the kind you need to read all at once to enjoy it best. I found I liked it more when I actually sat down and read it as opposed to just reading little bits here and there. When I took the long solid periods of time approach, the characters got, well, flatter, but less annoying, her writing seemed better, and the mystery more engrossing than prior, when I just read little increments of it.

The mystery took a while getting there, but when it did get there it was suitably interesting. It was a fun, turn your brain off kind of mystery, which probably wasn't what Flynn was going for, but I ended up liking it more that way. When I tried to look at it as, I don't know, commentary on the sorry state of the rural economy? On what poverty does to the mind? It fell dramatically flat. Flynn's plot lacked the subtlety for that to truly work; she tried to pile way, way too much into the last day of the Day family that it just came off as ultimately unrealistic and again, not subtle at all. Compare this novel to Tana French's Broken Harbor, the book I thought the most about while reading this one. I think both this book and Broken Harbor are trying to say the same thing, but the subtlety and almost mundaneness of how French portrayed the effect financial ruin has on a family blows Flynn's heavy-handed approach out of the water.

Flynn's writing was decent enough. Nothing mind blowing here, and there were a few odd metaphors and descriptions, but I liked it just fine. That being said, it surprisingly wasn't very original, just kind of generic thriller writing. I suppose the novelty of Flynn lies in her plots and heroines.

Also, the ending. For one, implausible. She should have decided on who exactly she wanted the killer to be, or perhaps her editor should have forced her into making a decision. Also, I think it went on a bit too long. I don't think Flynn knew how to end the book, and when it did end it was kind of clumsy and like she just put a period at the end of the last sentence and hit send. It reminded me of those awkward phone calls where neither party knows how to end it and the conversation goes for a beat too long and even then the call seems to end in mid sentence. It would have been better, I think, if she put the last Libby chapter right before the last Ben chapter and have the Ben chapter end it. I mean, it still would have been awkward, but it would have felt more like an actual ending.

So, I don't know if I'm exactly in a hurry to continue my Gillian Flynn reading experience. Gone Girl's probably never going to happen, but maybe Sharp Objects will? All I know is, there's something in me that refuses to write Ms Flynn completely.

7 out of 10