Dark Places

So here's Gillian Flynn's second novel - her third being Gone Girl, which I read and liked a lot six months ago. There are plenty of similarities between this book and that one. Both are murder mysteries, both take place in Flynn's native Missouri, both rely heavily on alternating points of view and unreliable narrators in order to pull off big twists, and both feature some pretty gruesome killings. But as dark and deranged as Gone Girl was, Dark Places was just so much bleaker.

The story revolves around a woman whose mother and two sisters were brutally murdered one night when she was nine years old. Her older brother is found guilty of the crime and sentenced to life without parole. Twenty-four years later, the girl - technically a full-grown woman, but understandably carrying all sorts of emotional baggage - lives with terrible depression, no friends, and no source of income. For twenty-four years, she's been living off of a generous pile of donations from all over the country, but the book begins with that particular well drying out. Forced to make her own money, she quickly finds a group of people whose shared hobby is solving decades-old murder mysteries. They're collectively convinced that her brother is innocent, and they'd love for her to reconnect with him and recant her testimony. She's happy to do this for a lofty price - and happy to reconnect with plenty of other suspects in the case for more of the same.

What follows, of course, is a lengthy ordeal in which our sad, sad heroine begins to reexamine her own understanding of her family's tragedy. Every other chapter flashes back to the day of the murders and is told from either her mother's or brother's viewpoint, and collectively the three narratives all end up revealing the full story. In my mind, the ending was a bit of a cheap trick, but I can't complain; the book was enticing and thrilling throughout, even though I'm not sure the author earned the particular conclusion she arrived at, which was kind of disappointing since she absolutely did so in Gone Girl. I mean, all in all, Gone Girl was a much better book.

But again, man, Dark Places was so much darker. The unhappiness in Gone Girl stems from an unhappy marriage. The unhappiness in Dark Places stems from a triple homicide. The main characters in Gone Girl are disappointed when their financial situation forces them to "trade down" from New York to suburban Missouri. The characters in Dark Places are deeply, deeply impoverished. Gone Girl takes place in McMansions and coffee shops and penthouses and conference halls. Dark Places takes place in sober living homes and prisons and strip clubs and run-down farms. Gone Girl is a murder mystery about rich and pretty people. Dark Places features elements of drug abuse, Satanic worship, and pedophilia.

Lastly, a film adaptation is due out in just a couple of weeks, starring Charlize Theron, Christina Hendricks, and Chloe Grace Moretz. Early reviews? Not great! I'll probably see it at some point, all the same.