Dark Places

pros:
— every scene between libby and ben was intense and emotional and the discomfort/relief present was portrayed beautifully
— realistic depiction of sibling dynamics is always appreciated

cons:
— the whodunnit sucked and made no sense and the mom was so stupid and even if it was desperation or whatever did she really not think that at least one of her kids might wake up and be like “who is this random person in our house” and DIE
— the book got very miserable and very boring by the middle of the story and libby really just isn't that fun of a main character and understand i am very forgiving of imperfect main female leads but it took a long time for me to believe that libby cared about her siblings at all (especially her sisters, which, not going to lie, rubbed me the wrong way because she grew up believing her BROTHER murdered them)
— gillian flynn is the gone girl author right? i don't think she likes women. like at all. diondra is the obvious example of this but the fact that libby is somehow the special magical sibling that ben liked and they have this like... undying connection even two decades later... hmmm...
— ok if it isn't obvious i am very rubbed that ben did not like his other siblings more and even libby took 4/5 of the entire damn book to confess any emotional attachment to michelle and debby like this book would have been way better if i knew libby actually liked her sisters early on
— like come on the entire premise of this book rides on the fact that libby was the sister that survived because if it had been debby that had lived none of this would have happened
— all the adults in this book were kind of stupid and here's the thing. you have a book from the perspective of kids, right? and the proper way to handle this kind of dynamic is to obviously place them side-by-side against the adults in their life that failed them and examine what went wrong in a scooby-doo fashion of “the adults are useless”. that didn't happen here, not only were the adults useless but there was also no real feeling of “the kids didn't deserve what happened to them” until near the end
— and even THEN the character i'm talking about (ben) immediately fucking ruins himself. like, for two whole seconds, in the scene with him writing down krissi day (i thought this was good writing actually) and some realization that he was just planning his daughter's life–i thought, wow, ben is actually a good guy? and everyone kind of ruined his life? and he is the worst treated character and definitely has my heart? and then the reveal with him covering up for michelle's murder happened and my sympathy died.

Reading this confirmed that I don't like reading thrillers, just as I don't like watching them. But, I really liked Gone Girl (the film), so when I saw this in the bargain section of a bookstore, I thought - hey, maybe this author writes a thriller I can get behind. Thought wrong.

Let this also be a record that I am far too imaginative and become far too invested in books for thrillers to be a good idea for me, ever, let alone right before I try to fall asleep. Incorporating this book into my pre-bedtime routine resulted in several nights of panicky lost sleep. Not because the book was particularly scary. All it takes it the premise of it all to get my mind going: Satan-worshipping cow-killers, axe-murderers hacking away at a poor farm family in the dead of a winters' night, the psychological trauma that ensues for a survivor of such an incident, etc. etc.

I will say, I did appreciate the ending. Felt neatly tied up and left the whole killing thing feeling less trivialized, more meaningful. But alas, not enough to make me rave about the book: which, though well-written and expertly sequenced, still is just not my cuppa tea.

Since I first read it a few years ago, I've consistently said Gone Girl was my favourite book. Dark Places has been sitting on my shelf, and I've been itching to read it, putting it off so it'd be all-the-more satisfying when I got to it.

Ironically, I guess, I didn't really enjoy the book - although that might be a little harsh. For the first third or so, the pacing was sloooooow and I constantly had to force myself to keep reading. Most flashback scenes were boring, and I found myself annoyed by Libby's character.

Eventually, however, the pace started to increase and I became hooked. I read the second half of the book in one night, when I was in a foul enough mood to palate the horrible themes. I know dark content isn't a bad thing - hell, it's implied by the title - but I found myself uncomfortable for a lot of the book. If the mystery hadn't started to come together by the halfway point, I expect I would have abandoned the book, to the chagrin of my past self.

I'm unsure how exactly to score the book. The plot was interesting enough to keep me invested, and I enjoyed the changes in perspective. On the other hand, I found almost all the characters (in present-day, at least) pretty boring, and spent parts of the book actively disliking the time I spent with it. Whether or not that was Flynn's intent, I can't say. I'm hoping when I eventually get to Sharp Objects it'll have the same magic Gone Girl had for me years ago.

You've gotta love a main character who tells you right out of the gate that she's not a good person. Libby goes on to prove it too: selfish, lazy, manipulative etc. I dig Flynn's fearlessness when it comes to her protagonists. She's not looking for you to worship or even necessarily identify with the character. But Libby is entertaining.

This was a fun-to-read suspenseful thriller. A real page-turner and I was surprised and engaged throughout. It's another book, like Sharp Objectswhere everything is so sleazy, but I guess that is half the fun.

This book was intense maybe in the last 100 pages. The rest of it was basically just build up. I figured the Magda character would play a bigger role, because there was lots of time spent on describing her and the other women who were obsessed with Ben.

I hated Patty. I found her absolutely spineless. She just seemed to buckle anytime anything got hard. It may sound harsh but I am not surprised that she was losing the farm as she couldn't fix ANY problems she had. She would brush anything and everything under the carpet pretending everything is fine. I realize that she was young when she married Runner but that was her first stupid decision and everything seemed to just get worse after that. Not using condoms because she “didn't want to nag” was just unbelievably stupid.

I liked how the story jumped back and forth in time, I understand that the point was to build up the tension but I think that it maybe should have started a little bit later. Every chapter just seemed to drag on with useless details.

I found Libby to be a whiner as well. You would think that what would drive her to find out about her family was to “get some peace” as she tells Ben but she does it for money.

I think I would have liked it better had the killer been Runner but they made him out way too stupid so I never thought it was him.

Overall not bad, but I think it could have been less draggy.

Gillian Flynn is such a fantastic writer and she never fails to show me time and time again exactly why she is one of my favourite authors.

This was nothing like Gone Girl or Sharp Objects and I think that's what makes it so great. It's never the same story. Flynn always tells these amazing stories whilst maintaining the eeriness and darkness that her other works do.

Unreliable narrators are my most favourite parts of books because I love that feeling of not knowing who to trust or believe. I loved that throughout this book I was second guessing every character I came across.

This book was dark with some interesting plot twists thrown in and I loved it.

True crime may be big business now, but it wasn't that long ago that people often viewed true crime as kind of morbid. So, in Gillian Flynn's Dark Places, when Libby Day, the only survivor of the murder of her entire family (besides her absentee father and the murderer himself), finds herself hard enough up for cash to attend the meeting of a group of true crime enthusiasts, the people she meets are very weird. The testimony Libby gave as a child put her older brother, Ben, behind bars, where he's been for the 25 years since. Little Libby had attracted donations for her future, and spent years living off of the proceeds, her unhealed psychological wounds (and not especially high levels of motivation) keeping her out of the workforce. But when she encounters the group, she's flat broke, and they offer her money to go back and talk to the people that were around back then...they believe Ben was innocent, and want Libby to help prove it.

The book is told through three perspectives: Libby in the present day, as well as Ben and their mother Patty in the past. We learn about the poverty the four Day children lived in on the family farm, their father's cruelty towards them, their mother's despair. We watch Libby's certitude about what happened on that terrifying night begin to erode as she digs deeper into the story, becomes invested despite herself. And we finally learn the truth of what happened, and Libby finds herself in danger of not surviving this time.

If you've read Flynn's enormously-bestselling Gone Girl (and you probably have, everyone has at this point, right?), you know that she really enjoys writing unlikable characters. Dark Places is not different on that score: Libby is prickly and angry, and although she obviously suffering from untreated PTSD and depression, it doesn't make her a pleasant person to spend time with. Teenage Ben has an inexplicable relationship with his rich and mean high school girlfriend, and a deeply problematic involvement with an elementary school girl. Patty is probably the most sympathetic, but her inability to protect her children from their father and the consequences of her own decisions make her difficult to really emotionally invest with. Everyone here is miserable and unable to cope with it, and while they do all feel realistic, it's very dark to spend time with them.

Unpleasant though they may be, the characters are richly realized, and Flynn's writing is compelling and vivid. The plot mostly hangs together through its twists and turns...at least, until the end. I'm not going to spoil it, but the ending feels incongruous with the rest of the book, taking a very different tone, and feels very out-of-left-field in a bad way. I'm not big into mystery/thrillers, so I'm not really sure how this fits into it and who exactly Flynn was writing for. It, like Gone Girl, is very interested in exploring female rage, and it feels by virtue of its character development more literary than typical for the genre. But it's also very bleak, with very little humor or lightness to break it up. It's well-constructed and interesting, but was not especially enjoyable for me to read. If what I've written sounds like something you're interested in checking out, I'd recommend it. But if it doesn't sound like it's for you, I assure you this is not a must-read.

After I read [b:Sharp Objects 66559 Sharp Objects Gillian Flynn https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1423241485s/66559.jpg 3801], I wrote off Gillian Flynn. It's not that I didn't like Sharp Objects, but it was so unbelievably disturbing that I didn't feel like more. But then I came down with the Flu, and Dark Places was one click away on my computer, for free from the library, while everything else was in that horrible far away land known as Up Stairs, so...The good news is that Dark Places is nowhere near as disturbing as Sharp Objects. The bad news? Well, terribly disturbing is what Gillian Flynn does best. In the absence of horribly disturbing, her work is pretty pedestrian. I worry that it may say bad things about me/society/violence on TV/etc. that I find a book about a mass murder of two children and their mother not that disturbing, but the fact of the matter is that it reads like any other murder mystery. It takes more than gore to make disturbing and Dark Places doesn't have anything else. It's a decent murder mystery, but really, nothing special.Which is a shame: some of the themes really seem like unique things to feature in a novel, especially a genre novel. However, Flynn really tells-not-shows both of her favorite themes: children taking small actions with large consequences (which in an especially heavy handed sequence, one of the characters offers a soliloquy about after expositing that he had accidentally set a forest fire by playing with a lighter and making an analogy to the main character's testimony in a murder trial as a child); and satanic panic. Satanic panic is such a great topic for a book – moral panics are fascinating, and satanic panic is clearly the best moral panic – it's recent enough to be memorable to most readers, distant enough that almost no one believes in it anymore and bizarre enough that it's mind-boggling that anyone ever took it seriously. However, Flynn deals with it much as I did: she has characters literally parrot words like “Satanic panic” and discuss the ways in which people fall prone to moral panics, instead of ever showing any characters emotionally struggling with the issues, or coming to terms with the idea that they fell prey to a panic or anything like that. So the exploration of these great, deep themes is really shallow. Finally, the characters in Dark Places are extremely sympathetic (with only one or two exceptions) – mostly people dealt a really hard blow by life and trying their best to keep going anyway. Honestly, I prefer these sympathetic but damaged characters over the extremely unsympathetic characters that star in her other books, but I felt like they weren't flawed enough. For instance, Libby Day, who regals us with stories of how blackened her soul is and how she's too lazy to even get out of bed? She says these things but at every turn in the narrative, she bends over backwards to give people the benefit of the doubt, help others, and challenge her own weaknesses. So, yeah. I would have actually preferred her to start out more troubled and Flynn to actually depict the character growth.

“The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty - we all have it.” The buildup was perfect, and I remember thinking to myself This may be my fav book by [a:Gillian Flynn 2383 Gillian Flynn https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1232123231p2/2383.jpg] (and I have read all her books) but the ending was such a letdown. I loved that the book had past and present timelines, and I loved the past timeline more than the present one coz it showed us how each character had become what they were in the present. It was also told from multiple povs and we got to see each person's thoughts, feelings, etc...But I feel like when I was abt 3/4 into the book, it was not any close to revealing the killer but I loved how the story was progressing so I didn't mind it. But like I said before the ending was such a letdown.However, I must say from all of [a:Gillian Flynn 2383 Gillian Flynn https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1232123231p2/2383.jpg] books and characters Libby may be my fav from all of them.Also, this is a rare occurrence but I like the movie much better than the book.

This review is also featured on Behind the Pages: Dark Places

Libby Day is living in a constant state of depression, fighting to keep the memories of her family's murder locked away. But the money from generous donations is beginning to run out and she might have to rejoin society. Mentally she isn't' ready. She doesn't have the drive to leave the house most days let alone handle a job. When the Kill Club reaches out to her, asking that she dig into her past and prove her brother Ben didn't kill her family, Libby outright refuses. Until they begin to pay her to interview people from her past. But sometimes it's better to leave the dark things hidden.

Once again I am stunned by Gillian Flynn's ability to expose the sinister side of humanity. Told through the eyes of Libby and her family, Dark Places switches between past and present, slowly edging readers into the final fatal night. Desperation can make a person do awful things, and Ben is no exception. Growing up poor and outcast from his fellow peers, Ben takes things to an extreme. But Gillian Flynn plants doubt into all the suspects and keeps readers guessing until the last few chapters.

It took me a little while to adjust to the main character. Libby is not built into a likable character. She has hit the ultimate low in life and refuses to move forward. She doesn't go through the standard growth and development of a character as the story progresses. Libby will gain more knowledge and understanding about her family, but don't expect her to be a different person by the end of this novel.

Dark Places is aptly named as the story exposes cruelties that strike close to home, as well as heinous acts that one doesn't expect to encounter. Be prepared for a twisted read that never lets up.

This is the book I would want to be buried with.
Gillian Flynn really knows people. These characters, they are real. The most terrifying thing about her books is that all of the stuff which unfolds is very very distrubingly real. It is more of a non-fiction and a study than it is a fiction. Weirdly enough there is relief in that. They help me find solutions more than a self help book ever can even though they are in the end, murder mysteries.