Review of Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

From Winston-Salem Journal --

Book Review: Dark dregs make for bad, bleak reading --

By Steven B. Beach --
March 14, 2010 --

DARK PLACES. By Gillian Flynn. Shaye Areheart Books. 245 pages. $24.

It takes nerve to try selling a work of fiction when your protagonist is unlikeable; doubly so when the offensive character is female. The lack of sympathy conflicts with the reasons for which most people read fiction. But that is exactly what Gillian Flynn has done with Dark Places. This novel is a figurative train wreck from Page One -- and it's a wreck that just keeps on happening.



Libby Day describes herself as "…deeply unlovable…. Draw a picture of my soul, and it'd be a scribble with fangs." Dark Places is a voyeuristic viewing of damaged goods.

At age 7, Libby lost fingers and toes to frostbite when she escaped into the snow as her mother and sisters were stabbed, shot, strangled and mutilated with an ax. Because of her eyewitness testimonty, her brother, Ben, has been in prison all his adult life for the murders. She understandably wants nothing to do with him. Libby is an angry, unfocused, solitary kleptomaniac supported by donations amassed from well-wishers after the murders. But the money is running out.

Enter the Kill Club, a group of real-life murder-mystery aficionados who contend that Ben is innocent, and who are willing to pay Libby to seek answers from those intimately connected with the murders. Since she can't imagine reporting to a job in which she'd be expected to actually work, she takes full advantage of the offer -- even though it means confronting her past and spending time among people, some she'd rather not meet and some she'd rather never see again.

The book is written as two separate stories shuffled together like a deck of cards. Readers will alternate between the third-person limited viewpoints of three key players in 1985 and Libby's current-time, first-person narrative. The doling out of details forms a disturbing picture of events explaining actions and motives but few redeeming qualities of any characters.

Morbid curiosity kept me turning pages in the first half of this book. By the second half, I had become invested enough in this well-developed mystery to keep reading because I wanted to know how it worked out.

My difficulty with this story stemmed not from any perceived lack of expertise on the author's part, but in whom and what I was reading about. The characters are, almost without exception, the dregs of society: losers, drunks, liars and scoundrels. Couple that with the bleak setting of small-town life in depressed farm country where everything has gone wrong, then add enough angst to put Pollyanna on Prozac, thrill-kill mutilation of farm animals and sex scenes that invariably involve children, and you'll have an accurate depiction of this story. Precious little happiness can be found in Dark Places.

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

From Bookslut --

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn --

By Beth Harrington --
July 2009 --

In 2007, Gillian Flynn released her debut novel Sharp Objects which was nominated for an Edgar Award. I did not read Sharp Objects, but I intend to now in hopes that it is anywhere nearly as compelling as her sophomore effort. It is hard to imagine a novel that so agilely balances the suspense of a mystery whodunit with the interior complexity of a psychological narrative as Dark Places.

In 1985, Libby Day's fifteen year-old brother was charged with murdering their mother and two sisters in a rural Kansas farm town as part of a satanic ritual -- subtly reminiscent of the West Memphis Three case. Only seven years-old, Libby managed to escape and served as a witness for the prosecution at her brother's trial, clinching his guilty verdict. At the age of thirty-one, she is not exactly thriving a quarter-century after the killings. She lives alone in a rented bungalow in a neighborhood that is mostly populated with senior citizens. She does not work, surviving on a bank account of donations submitted in the aftermath of her family's murders. She cites a host of tics and idiosyncrasies that control the space where memories of her mother, sisters, and even her brother have decayed. When she receives word that her assets are nearly gone, Libby agrees to be a guest at the Kill Club -- a fan group for people obsessed with the trivia of popular murders -- for a fee.

What starts out as an attempt to solicit money and assuage any doubts about her brother's guilt, transforms into a quest to discover what really did happen on that fateful night and why. Chapters alternate between the present narrated by Libby and the past on the day leading up to the murders, revealing a chain of events in which no detail is inconsequential and no person lacks an ulterior sensibility. Patty Day is a haggard mother of four, determined not to let her family's farm go bankrupt even as she struggles to make ends meet for her children. Runner Day is Patty's deadbeat ex-husband, showing up at the farm whenever he pleases to beg favors from the family he should be supporting. Ben Day emerges as a complicated loner, angry yet sensitive, struggling with all of the urges and confusion that make adolescence so unpleasant. In the current time, Libby's once-idle days are spent chasing leads that send her all over the Midwest from highway strip joints to a Missouri suburb where she meets the only family member born after the murders.

While some readers may find the answer to the whodunit mystery -- with its collision of cataclysmic events and their unintended consequences -- less satisfying than the emergence of a sole, responsible villain, the book's conclusion as a whole more than compensates. What makes the ending so rich is that Libby's redemption -- if it can be called that -- is so subtly evoked. Libby does not fall in love, she does not have a child, and it is not entirely clear how she get by now that she has unraveled the tragedy of her past. She has merely acquired a small belief that goodness exists, a hard-earned willingness to reach out to others. Saved is not the word to describe Libby Day at the end of Dark Places but rather, salvaged, and in Gillian Flynn's skilled hands, that is enough.