Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

I got acquainted with Gillian Flynn through her short story in last year's cross-genre anthology, Rogues. What I liked about the story was it's pot-boiler tension and especially the cynical, acidic voice of the character. I had also watched the film adaptation of her best-selling Gone Girl not too long before that so I decided the time would come when I checked her out. 

Dark Places is first and foremost a mystery about a woman who is investigating the cult-related murders of her family 25 years after the fact in order to find some sort of inner peace. All of the conventional mystery tropes and techniques are there, the subtle clues, the red herrings, the recap of evidence, the consideration and rejection of various suspects...To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of mysteries, as I can always see the tick-tick-ticking of the clockworks behind the plot and usually have it figured out before the character's have. This was no exception, although I must say I had two theories going here and both were only half right. 

But, man, this book is so much more than a mystery. This little book packs a lot in: the psychological aftereffects of trauma, the little lies humans constantly tell themselves to feel better, the sinister underside to the cutesy way adults treat children, sibling rivaly, the plight of desperately poor underclass drowning in debt, the 1980s farm crisis, the meanspiritedness of small towns, the exploitation of (some but not all)crimes by the media, devil worship, underage sex, the path of psychological carnage crimes and lies can wreak...All of it deftly, unpreachily, matter-of-factly part of the story and the characters themselves. 

It blew me the fuck away.

The story is mostly set in rural Kansas in the mid 1980s, in the plains north of the Flint Hills and in modern day Kansas City Missouri. Having grown up poor in semi-rural Missouri myself at the time(I'm almost exactly the same age as the imprisoned Ben Day in the story) and spending time in various places in the Midwest, she nails it. The run down feeling of urban decay. The sick feeling of envy and sadness felt by the children of the have nots. The headachey banality of evil that grows out of oppressive boredom. The hypersensitivity of misfit teenagers and the fight they make for their souls in a bleak landscape. The utterly empty and eternal loneliness of the prairie in winter that makes you feel small, effect-less, mean and meaningless. 

The prose is simple and easy to read. It reminded me a little of Chuck Palahniuk, though less minimalistic: the depressed, cynical, ever-angry voice of the protagonist had a lot to do with that. There are passages and twists of wording that are just sublime--simple, but elegant. IN a twisted sort of way.

And if the setting seems a little overly grey and depressing, run down and broken... it's worth noting that all of the point of view characters are suffering from rather real and severe depression. Things really do look like that there sometimes. All dull and headachey. Flynn has a journalistic eye that paints pictures that I've seldom seen painted before anywhere but my own memories.

It actually brought back a lot of memories. 

The characters feel incredibly real to me: if they don't leap off the page, it's mainly because they are too tired and depressed to leap. But they do get off the page and into your skull. 

The teenage boy in me identified strongly with the forlorn Ben Day(although at least he gets laid. Unlike the teenage boy in me.) But the main character, Libby Day is the real achievement here. Hateful, full of anger, dishonest, conniving...somehow, by some sort of magic, Gillian Flynn makes the unlikable sympathetic and likable. It all makes sense. How could Libby be any other than what she is?

The book is not for everybody. It's almost relentless in it's darkness. There's a lot of really disturbing themes. The climactic scenes are breathtakingly violent and really quite horrible. I like that kind of thing but a lot of people don't. Other people have complained about foul language.(that never bothers me.
But it's a breeze to read(I did it in about 2 days) and it's going to stick with me afor a long time. Yeah, if you're not squeamish...read it.