LIT FOR LIVING: Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

 

In her acknowledgements, Gillian Flynn, the author of Sharp Objects and now Dark Places, writes about her husband, “What do I say to a man who knows how I think and still sleeps next to me with the lights off?” But then when you check out the author photo and see this smiling, attractive, quite normal-looking woman in her thirties, it’s not hard to see why he’d be willing. Stephen King (who incidentally gave Sharp Objects a very flattering early blurb before it went on to be short-listed for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel) is hardly monstrous-looking either, but still, you can somehow imagine those fairly twisted scenarios going on inside that head. With Flynn, however, you can’t help wondering what terrible thoughts could this chic, successful, one-time Entertainment Weekly television and book critic possibly be having?

 

As with books, it’s a lesson in not judging an author by his or her cover (or book jacket photo). Because when you start to read the first few sentences of Dark Places, this is what you find: “I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit 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 never a good little girl, and I got worse after the murder.”

 

Whoa. Maybe that husband of hers does have reason to be a tad uneasy, after all. Reading even further, one soon recalls a long-ago reviewer of a Joan Didion book asking, “Is there anything anyone can do to cheer this woman up?” With Flynn, as with Didion, the answer is: “Not likely.”

 

The “dark places” explored here involve Libby Day, one of the only survivors of the Day family killing spree, called the Prairie Massacre and the Farmhouse Satan Sacrifice, wherein Libby’s older brother, Ben, then in high school and falsely accused of child molestation and devil worshipping, was thought to have murdered Libby’s mother and two older sisters on a bitter early January evening back in the mid-1980s. Other critics have noted that the bleak, Midwestern landscape (the novel takes place on the plains of rural Kansas) evokes Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and it’s easy to see why they’d say so. It’s hard to imagine the events described occurring anywhere else other than beneath the bleakest of skies, on land that’s as flat and desolate as the landlocked lives depicted.
 

 

Early on in the novel, Libby morosely observes,

It was a miserable, wet-bone March and I was lying in bed thinking about killing myself, a hobby of mine. Indulgent afternoon daydreaming: A shotgun, my mouth, a bang and my head jerking once, twice, blood on the wall. Spatter, splatter.

 

Just seven when the murders occurred, Libby—the only family member left beside her brother and long-since-flown-the-coop father—is now thirty-one and almost out of money; the fund that has been feeding her over the years, courtesy of do-gooders feeling sorry for the victim she once was, is finally starting to run dry. But apparently there are a few groups out there still following such gory dramas from afar, including the Kill Club, a group of curious oddballs who meet and discuss various conspiracy theories about notorious killings and are willing to pay for firsthand information. Given that Libby hasn’t exactly acquired many job skills over the years and lacks enthusiasm for more regular work, Libby agrees to make a deal:

I’d take whatever Lyle Wirth gave me, because otherwise I was looking at a real job, real soon, and I wasn’t up for that. I’m not someone who can be depended on five days a week. Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday? I don’t even get out of bed five days in a row . . . .

 

Libby’s willingness to meet with the group puts the novel in motion for real, wrapping it up, for better and for worse, in Flynn’s airtight structure of past and present—the now chronicled in first-person narration from Libby, the then in a third-person re-creation of the days leading up to and the actual night of the killing spree, mostly from Ben’s and their mother’s points of view. Better in that it serves the purpose of keeping the suspense going, worse in the sense that it can feel like a little bit of a tease, and occasionally downright irritating, to have the author unveil the back story in such a slow, “green-light, red-light,” write-by-numbers fashion.

 

What helps is that as we revisit the principal characters from the murders in the present story—the ones still alive, that is—the plot slowly thickens as opposed to thinning. Libby, we find out, was apparently coached by prosecuting attorneys and may not have actually witnessed the murders, after all. In fact, her unsubstantiated testimony is most likely what put her brother away. Ben was either not there when the killings happened, or may have been there, but may not have been there alone. The estranged, alcoholic father, Runner, may also have been there, but Libby doubts he’d even be capable of such a crime and certainly wouldn’t be able to keep it to himself had he committed it. Whereas most whodunits start out with many possibilities and go about the process of reducing those to only a few, then a couple, and then just one, Flynn turns that formula on its head, with her unlikely and unlikable heroine thinking she knows exactly what has happened at the onset, only to start considering numerous possible scenarios as the novel progresses.

But it’s really Flynn’s line-by-line writing that separates her from the pack of most other genre writers, including Stephen King himself: her pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, her ability to write in the first or third person with equal ease and precision, and her superb pacing. So much of the pleasure of reading Flynn’s novel has to do with the mood she conveys, the utterly bleak and unblinking stare at the impoverished lives she’s describing. It’s like getting James Agee’s A Death in the Family, John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks all rolled into one. In fact, it’s hard to think of another female writer, with the possible exception of Flannery O’Connor or Joyce Carol Oates, who can write so unflinchingly about violence, and especially violence committed by women. Meanwhile, there’s the page-turning business of who really did kill the Days?

 

On second thought, what may well cheer Flynn up is the fact that there’s already a movie being made of Sharp Objects (Flynn has been hired to write the screenplay) and that Dark Places somehow avoids the treacherous sophomore slump entirely. All this has allowed Flynn to quit her day job at Entertainment Weekly and become the full-time novelist she always wanted to be, able to work out whatever dark you-know-what that is trapped inside that head of hers—quite a perk for her, her husband, and her quickly growing audience. [AUGUST 2009] 

Managing editor Chris Newbound writes about books and theater and other stuff, too, for Berkshire Living. Check out his blog at www.BerkshireLiving.com.

 

 

THE GOODS

Dark Places
By Gillian Flynn
Shaye Areheart Book

 

Author photo by Dana Rossini