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Title: Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
Details: Copyright 2009, Random House
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "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."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I'd read and enjoyed Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl some years ago and her ability to blend good plotting with the tawdriness of tabloid true crime culture is highly entertaining.
How I Liked It: A phrase kept coming to me as I read this book. It's a phrase contained nowhere within the actual book, and frankly, it's a phrase I hate.
"Smartly crafted."
It's a pat, even cutesy little expression that you usually find smeared across movie posters and cribbed from hyperbolic reviews. But the fact is, there are some things that truly are smartly crafted, and this book is one of them.
I admit, from the description, I wasn't prepared to enjoy it, despite enjoying Gone Girl.
As a whole, I don't really like crime fiction, either in screen or book form. It tends to be utterly rife with tropes and too often devoid of the actual emotional impact involved with these situations. But there are exceptions, and Flynn's work is apparently one of them. This book surpassed the description fairly early in.
The story is told in two contrasting parts, one in the then-present of 2009 by Libby Day in the first person, sole survivor of a massacre perpetrated allegedly by her brother Ben in her home when she was only seven. The second is told in 1985, just before the incident, in the third person alternately through the eyes of teenage Ben and murdered mother Patty.
In 2009, turns out Libby has basically been living off from the tragedy since she turned eighteen, whether it's strangers' donations or an "inspirational" book she wrote. But money is drying up now and she has to think of something. Approached by true crime junkies (who appear in several settings that are chillingly realistic from a convention with armchair sleuths with pet theories fond of shouting accusations to victims to a group of fangirls of all ages of her accused alleged murderer brother), Libby takes on their cause for the money, and in turn realizes she doesn't actually know the truth of that night as well as she thought she did.
It's a revelation that should be insufferable for its triteness, but in the hands of Flynn and her so-unlikeable-she-becomes-likeable antiheroine, it's genuinely entertaining. Libby is an anti-social pickpocket plagued by nightmares who has spent considerable time in the public eye and still has no idea how to act around people and doesn't really care (one memorable example, at a meeting at a dive bar with the head of the Kill Club, she steals the salt and pepper shakers from the table, and when he points out they're in her pockets when leaving, she merely nods).
A lesser author might overdose on the sympathy of Libby's bleak life, but Flynn relates it through Libby matter-of-factly, and the book is the better for it. Libby goes from an antiheroine to a genuine heroine by the end of the book, and somehow the sentiment never feels manufactured.
Meanwhile in 1985, the Day family desperately copes with the Farming Crisis and Satanic Panic, neither of which bodes well for them. Flynn fleshes out the backstory to have backstories of its own, and a greater scope and understanding genuinely enriches the "present" of the novel, and seemingly no detail is too tiny not to have plot pay off down the line. A throwaway phrase, a habit, an odd proclivity, anything seems up for notice and import later on.
When we reach the ending, not all the loose ends are tied and that loses some of the momentum but none of the emotional investment or the lasting impact of the characters. From her minute attention to detail with most plot points to the carefully woven mystery and suspense, it's genuinely a page-turner, and, well...
Smartly crafted.
Notable: I touched on this above, but wanted to give it special mention. Flynn's pop cultural details about the crime are frankly staggeringly good. A National Enquirer article and headline, a shoddy true crime book (considered the book on the case) written early on with a remorseful author in the years since, murder groupies, web sleuths/armchair detectives/true crime fans with seriously questionable ethics and personal decorum, the grift of "inspirational" books from those related to famous crimes, and far more fill the landscape of Flynn's novel and give it a plausibility that is out and out unsettling.
Final Grade: A
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