Dark Places, Gillian Flynn

Edward Gorey, from The Gashlycrumb Tinies, 1963

(July 19) An unofficial motto can be found on p. 145: “life was grim.”

For the first three-quarters or so of this book, I was like -- yecchh -- this is just one long gross-out -- but I did want to read to the end to see how Flynn wrapped it up. Dark Places definitely has that grabs-your-interest thing going, like her others -- it just seems even more obsessed with the disgusting, sordid, gross details of daily life than the other two, and they were pretty bad. It’s almost like Flynn is an adolescent boy. She overdoes the ew factor.

In terms of “world-making,” though Flynn acknowledges advice from agricultural experts in the Acknowledgements, it’s clear she doesn’t know how a farm is run, and this bugged me.

And, she equates poverty with smelly laundry and unwashed clothes in general -- such items get described in full at every opportunity. It’s like people with income problems wouldn’t be so pathetic if they just washed their clothes a little more. ::eye roll::

These things give the book an amateurish feel, which only makes sense since it was a first novel.

A lot of the Amazon reviewers who awarded Dark Places only one star say the same as I do -- “loved Gone Girl, read this because of that, but this is so depressing and revolting I almost didn’t finish it.”

So, at the three-quarter mark, I was thinking I’d be giving this book less than 3 stars -- even though I was kind of hooked on the story. At that point I thought I would pretty much be constantly on the verge of vomiting through the last 70 or 80 pages just to reach the denouement.

BUT THEN

At roughly the three-quarters mark, the plot got so unbelievably interesting. I mean, my curiosity was already piqued or I would have stopped reading, but -- pow. All of a sudden a lot of unexpected resolutions to the main mystery start to make some weird kind of sense. And there is a scene with the narrator and a niece that is a horror-movie classic and yet is done with words on the page.... pretty amazing.

This made the whole book suddenly seem way more clever and well-crafted. Maybe a reader gets played by the book like this, with the icky but neutral story line going on for so long. Lulled by the ick.

So. 3 stars. Or even 3.5.