Dark Places (book review)

The cover of “Dark Places” is a fitting picture: a rusted padlock hangs open on the latch of an old door, black and foreboding, its paint weathered. It is an invitation to anyone who happens upon it to open it up and see what’s inside, their curiosity leading them to either brilliant discovery or grim revelation. The same can be said for author Gillian Flynn, the invisible house of her macabre imagination accessible to whomever dares to swing open its dark portal and slip into the shadowy pool of creativity that lies within.

The reader will be immediately taken by the character of Libby Day – caustic and unsentimental, she is a murky soul who is willing to abandon all sense of self-preservation. Equipped with a lackadaisical and suicidal outlook instigated by tragedy (her entire family save for her older brother Ben was murdered in 1985 when she was 7 years old), Libby walks through her pitiful excuse for a life in Kinnakee, Kansas empty, rarely finding happiness in either the numerous effects she steals from every place she goes or the hodgepodge of hard-knock memories from when her mother and sisters were alive. Estranged from Ben since his conviction and abusive to the few surviving family members she has, Libby has run out of both sympathizers and money. Broke and desperate to make ends meet (she refuses to get a job), she humors a group of true crime enthusiasts by selling off memorabilia and contacting old acquaintances for money. In the process, she begins to believe those who are adamant about Ben’s innocence and uncovers a long kept secret that may put her in the ground with the rest of the Day women.

Though told mostly in Libby’s voice (an exquisitely dark, astringent and spellbinding narrator, the best I’ve ever read), the novel switches perspectives between her, Ben and their mother Patty, moving back and forth between present day and the 24 hours leading up to the killings. Ben feels the same ambivalence towards his childhood, he and Libby harboring much resentment and little affection towards their rogue, unreliable and alcoholic father Runner. In teenage rebellion and a desire to be accepted, Ben mixes himself up with the wrong crowd, a move that will end up costing him his already shaky reputation and Libby’s faith in him. Patty is losing ground both in confidence and property, the Days’ growing poverty threatening to take their farm away; as assets dwindle, her desperation grows, leading her to do the unthinkable to save her family from total indigence. Slowly but surely the details of that terrible night in early January come to light, exhonerating some and incriminating others, all the while keeping the reader on the edge of their seat until the very end when Ben’s part in the massacre is revealed and the past and present collide in a thrilling climax, peril consuming both sides.

And all of this comes from an author who looks like a girl-next-door, based on an at-a-glance estimation from her photo on the back flap of the hardcover edition jacket. With a calm, inviting and attractive face, long hair cascading gracefully over her shoulders, Ms. Flynn is a beauty and would hardly set off any alarm bells for peculiarity. She is smiling slightly, a Mona Lisa smile, her eyes fixed on the camera lens and giving no indication of the twisted imagination that one will be taken hostage by when they read the first few sentences:

“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. It’s the Day blood. Something’s wrong with it.”

“I was not a lovable child, and I’d grown into a deeply unlovable adult. Draw a picture of my soul, and it’d be a scribble with fangs. In class photos my hair was always crooked – barrettes hanging loosely from strands, as if they were airborne objects caught in the tangles – and I always had bulging pockets under my eyes, drunk-landlady eyes. Maybe a grudging curve of the lips where a smile should be. Maybe.”

Once one has drunk all 349 pages of Flynn’s intoxicating prose, it’s hard not to look at her picture again, look in her eyes, the apothegmatic windows to a person’s soul, and think: Darkplace. After all, the she herself jokes in her Acknowledgments that her husband Brett “knows how I think and still sleeps next to me with the lights off”.

Bottom line: Gillian Flynn is a brilliant writer, one who is a definitive asset to her genre by giving birth to intense and unforgettable characters, and “Dark Places” is a bleak and precarious passage into destitution, desperation and the delicate cracks of the human psyche. I look forward to her literary machinations with the perverse delight that only dark minds like ours can muster.