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phwoarker 's review for:
Dark Places
by Gillian Flynn
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.
WHOOOAH! What an opener. It takes some serious ovaries to start a book like that, but Flynn starts as she means to go on and, as the title suggests, this book is DARK.
A couple of pages later we get: I was not a lovable child, and I'd grown into a deeply unlovable adult. Draw a picture of my soul and it would be a scribble with fangs.
This is Libby Day, our main protagonist. When Libby was a child, her mother and two sisters were brutally murdered on a cold winter night on their remote Kansas farm. Libby escaped and survived. Her older brother, Ben, was convicted of murdering the family as part of a devil-worshipping ritual, and Libby spent the rest of her childhood terrorising a succession of increasingly distant relatives and foster parents who took her in. Her adulthood has been spent living alone and eking out the sizeable fund donated by caring strangers to 'poor Libby Day', the girl who lived. Now in her early 30s, she is a lonely, depressed (although she never gives it a name), misanthropic kleptomaniac and the fund that has sustained her all of these years is running out.
To try and make a bit of cash, Libby agrees to attend a meeting of the 'Kill Club', a group of people obsessed by famous murders and unsolved crimes. This stimulates her to (begrudgingly at first) reconsider what happened all those years before, and the Kill Club offer to pay her to re-investigate some of the people and events surrounding her family's murder.
This was a thoroughly enjoyable, dark and twisted mystery. The narrative switches between Libby's investigation in the modern day (I think it's set in 2007-ish?) and events leading up to the murders in the 1980s from the perspectives of her mother (Patty) and Ben. The fictional town of Kinnakee, Kansas, is a hostile and insular place full of secrets and rumours, and there's a brilliant cast of distinctive characters who are all shifty and suspicious in their own ways.
The plot is tight and the ending was very satisfying. However, while it was generally well-paced, it did feel a bit flabby in the middle, where the action slowed down considerably.
Probably my favourite thing about the book was Libby. She was deeply flawed - selfish, conflicted, angry and often cruel to the people around her - but I ended up really rooting for her. Her character progression was good, if a bit workmanlike.
I was fascinated by the exploration of the hysteria surrounding satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s and in particular
I'm looking forward to reading Sharp Objects now, although I think I might need a break and to read something light and fluffy before I embark on another book by Flynn.
WHOOOAH! What an opener. It takes some serious ovaries to start a book like that, but Flynn starts as she means to go on and, as the title suggests, this book is DARK.
A couple of pages later we get: I was not a lovable child, and I'd grown into a deeply unlovable adult. Draw a picture of my soul and it would be a scribble with fangs.
This is Libby Day, our main protagonist. When Libby was a child, her mother and two sisters were brutally murdered on a cold winter night on their remote Kansas farm. Libby escaped and survived. Her older brother, Ben, was convicted of murdering the family as part of a devil-worshipping ritual, and Libby spent the rest of her childhood terrorising a succession of increasingly distant relatives and foster parents who took her in. Her adulthood has been spent living alone and eking out the sizeable fund donated by caring strangers to 'poor Libby Day', the girl who lived. Now in her early 30s, she is a lonely, depressed (although she never gives it a name), misanthropic kleptomaniac and the fund that has sustained her all of these years is running out.
To try and make a bit of cash, Libby agrees to attend a meeting of the 'Kill Club', a group of people obsessed by famous murders and unsolved crimes. This stimulates her to (begrudgingly at first) reconsider what happened all those years before, and the Kill Club offer to pay her to re-investigate some of the people and events surrounding her family's murder.
This was a thoroughly enjoyable, dark and twisted mystery. The narrative switches between Libby's investigation in the modern day (I think it's set in 2007-ish?) and events leading up to the murders in the 1980s from the perspectives of her mother (Patty) and Ben. The fictional town of Kinnakee, Kansas, is a hostile and insular place full of secrets and rumours, and there's a brilliant cast of distinctive characters who are all shifty and suspicious in their own ways.
The plot is tight and the ending was very satisfying. However, while it was generally well-paced, it did feel a bit flabby in the middle, where the action slowed down considerably.
Probably my favourite thing about the book was Libby. She was deeply flawed - selfish, conflicted, angry and often cruel to the people around her - but I ended up really rooting for her. Her character progression was good, if a bit workmanlike.
I was fascinated by the exploration of the hysteria surrounding satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s and in particular
Spoiler
the way that children who reported being abused were treated by psychologists and the legal system. I found the way that Krissi Cates' claims were dealt with by her parents and the psychologist really disturbing, it worried me a little bit reading about a child (or anyone) lying about being sexually abused, I suppose because victims of these crimes are often not taken seriously in real life, with the assumption being that they're lying, so this aspect made me feel very uncomfortable. However, I was interested to read (on Wikipedia) that during the 1980s lots of children were interviewed using these now discredited techniques, leading them to fabricate experiences that they didn't have or exaggerate their experiences to match what the adult interviewing them wanted to hear.I'm looking forward to reading Sharp Objects now, although I think I might need a break and to read something light and fluffy before I embark on another book by Flynn.