First Officer's Log No 18: Creepy, Eerie, and Oh-So-Cool, Part 2

This is how I imagine the current book I'm reading being created:

'Entertainment Weekly' writer / reviewer Gillian Flynn sits down, perusing her bookshelves for inspiration, and her eyes fall upon Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. She raises an eyebrow, thinks I could write about a farm family - a mother, two sisters - that is brutally murdered and the aftermath of such an event. Of course, she'll need good insight into how someone deals with the aftermath of such a heinous crime, the brutal slaying of a mother, and she sees James Ellroy's My Dark Places. Ah hah! she thinks, There's my title, even. Dark Places. Her eyes scan her shelves, narrowing as she closes in on where to form the central character, the one through whose eyes she can tell the story, and her gaze falls upon Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. Of course! I'll create the most narcissistic, self-loathing woman I can imagine! The sole survivor of what has happened, and she'll make Bella Swann seem like a high class intellectual!

I'm probably being a bit mean. I'm really enjoying Gillian Flynn's Dark Places, which is, as described, a novel about a farm family's brutal murder, and the sole survivor, little Libby Day, who is convinced her older brother Ben is responsible. Her testimony at age seven sends him to prison for the murders, but twenty five years later questions are raised by a group of true crime enthusiasts calling themselves the Kill Club. They are convinced Ben is innocent, and Libby is forced to reexamine that long ago day and the events leading up to the incident which changed her life.

I'm at the half way point in this novel, and Flynn is a marvelous writer. She has a knack for characters, and the sequence in which she describes Libby's first visit to the Kill Club is amongst the most skin-crawling things I've read. There is something truly disturbing about this novel, the understanding that there are people who truly sleep, live and breathe true crime, and will risk the alienation of 'normal' society to pursue their obsessions.

There is something quite compelling about Libby, despite the fact that she is amongst the most narcissistic, self-loathing, and, quite frankly, unpleasant characters I've ever read. Most of the novel is from her perspective, and she is bluntly self aware of her own character, which I do find somewhat refreshing. Perhaps it is the fact that she knows that she's not a nice person, not a good person, and has had questions, but is unwilling to explore them. Flynn has written a great character here, even if I found myself reading her with increasing distaste, but still wanted to read more. To me, this is the sign of a very good book.

Perhaps not as creepy as Jennifer McMahon's Promise Not to Tell, Gillian Flynn's Dark Places is still great reading, and a perfect book to curl up with in mid October.

Until next week, fellow Bibliophiles.