Dark Places

A Fun Character Read

If you like good characters than this is a must. It doesn't even bother me that the end was pretty clear long before the book started winding down because the characters still resonate with me hours after finishing.

It is a book I borrowed from the library but bought as soon as I was done.

Gillian Flynn definitely knows how to write a dark story. Both this and Sharp Objects were disturbing, but still not as disturbing as Gone Girl. I'm looking forward to her next book!

WOW. Dark. I was almost finished and had to take a break because I couldn't bear to go forward. Picked it back up and made it through.

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.

Annihilation.

Dark Places for me is better that Gone Girl. Nice twist, and the transition from what happened thay Day and today.

Another mad lady made by Gillian Flynn. Good story. Nice setting. Bad luck. And not a lucky day.

Gillian Flynn pulls no punches with her novels. “Dark Places” lives up to it's title as it explores the dark places of the minds of its central characters. It is a tense novel, at times sinister and sometimes disturbing. Taken as a whole it is an excellent read, but only if you like dark and disturbing.

A great suspenseful novel. A lot less disturbing then Flynn's Sharp Objects which I appreciate. this novel is riveting, intense, and graphic. I just wish for more closure in the book.

I read this immediately after Sharp Objects. IMO, Sharp Objects was twice as good. I found myself skimming through parts of this one because it just dragged on too much. Not an awful read, but it could have been much better.

Meh. Whereas Gone Girl sizzles with & revels in its depravity, this book just kinda trudges depressingly through it. Not the best kind of story to read on maternity leave, really. I think if I'd read it at any other time on my life I would have appreciated it more.

I can't say I enjoy this book, that would be awkward and wrong. Who enjoys a book so despicable, so gritty, so absolutely horrible in both plot and characters? You can't root for anyone in this book. Everyone has their own bit of ugliness that can't be redeemed. But, nonetheless, I found myself enjoying the mystery and finding out who did it. Quite impressed with Gillian Flynn.

This is a crazy, suspenseful, creepy, bizarre, and twisty novel. Of course, it wouldn't be Gillian Flynn if it wasn't all of those things :)

Awesome book that gives you a true mystery that you won't figure out until the very end!

This is the second book I've read by Gillian Flynn (I read Gone Girl not too long ago).  I am usually not drawn into the dark and twisted, but Flynn has a way of drawing you in and leaving you wanting more. I don't even want to think about where she gets ideas for her stories, but do appreciate reading them from the safety and comfort of my little nest! Flynn is a masterful writer and I will definitely continue to read her work.

It broke my heart, and made me work–and I enjoyed every minute of it. A fantastic Mr. Toad's Wild Ride of a horror novel.