Spoiler Warning: The first two sections don’t really have a lot of spoilers. They’re mainly discussing the basic premise and some vague plot details. The final section discusses the ending and I spoil pretty much all of it. If you haven’t read the book and don’t want to be spoiled, stop before The Ending section.
I recently read Dark Places by Gillian Flynn of Gone Girl fame. I read this after Gone Girl, which I think is her more popular and well-known work. I remember liking Gone Girl well enough, but not being as in love with it as everyone else, so I went into this with pretty reasonable expectations. I had heard people say they liked it, so I was expecting it to be good enough at least, even if I might not end up loving it personally, which is fine.
My Experience Reading This vs. Gone Girl
I think I had a different experience reading Gone Girl than some others did because I already knew a lot of the plot. By the time I read it, it was already pretty ubiquitous. The movie had already come out, so a lot more people knew the plot, and it was already at the point where a lot of other stories with similar plot twists were being compared to it. It was kind of at the ‘Luke, I am your father’ point where everybody expected you to know the twist.
For this book, I didn’t know anything about the plot. I’m pretty sure when I bought this I didn’t even read the synopsis. I really enjoyed going into this totally blind because basically everything was a surprise to me. Like even stuff that probably shouldn’t have been a surprise was a surprise.
Something I’ve noticed about thrillers in general is that I can sometimes start to piece together what’s happening at around the halfway point. In Girl on the Train, for example, I pretty much figured out everything that was happening sometime around then. I can’t say for sure if that would have happened in Gone Girl, since I already knew the plot going in, but from what I remember at a certain point (maybe halfway) it just tells you what’s going on anyway. So I think in some stories, it’s almost expected that you might know what’s going on at a certain point in the story.
This book kept me on my toes a lot more than other thrillers usually do. It has a lot of twists and dead ends even leading up toward the end. I haven’t read too many where they’ll have characters or plot elements that end up meaning nothing and it doesn’t feel like it was a mistake in the story. I think this is because the plot is about a character investigating a cold case. A lot of times when somebody’s researching a real life cold case, there will be dead ends or people who you think are involved but it turns out aren’t, so it felt like it fit in this type of story.
True Crime
This story pulls a lot from true crime, which is fairly common in thrillers, but I think it goes more into it here than most. Gone Girl was kind of like that too in how much it pulled from the Laci Peterson case, which is also referenced here, so maybe this is Gillian Flynn’s style. I also thought this story was based on a true case, but when I looked at the couple I thought it was based on, they weren’t really that similar other than a family being killed in a farmhouse.
The plot of the book is the main character, Libby, whose mother and sisters were murdered when she was a child. Her brother was convicted for the crime and sent to prison, but at the time the book takes place, she has been contacted by a group of true crime enthusiasts who believe he is innocent. They are willing to finance her to contact people who were involved in the crime and ask them for new information that may prove his innocence.
At the beginning of the book, Libby doesn’t believe he is innocent, but decides to help them because she needs the money. As the story goes on and she talks to more people, she starts to believe he may be innocent. It sort of reminded me of the way the Adnan Syed case is portrayed sometimes, but there are other true crime stories that do this too.
When she first goes to meet the true crime group, called the Kill Club, it’s at a big convention. There are multiple different groups and individuals who all focus on different cases or killers. There are a lot of references to real killers here, which I thought was interesting because it helps to pull this story into the real world.
The one issue I had with this aspect, and I’ve noticed it in other thrillers that involve true crime too, is that it tries to portray it as being mostly male. The ones who are obsessed with serial killers in this scene are mainly men and all of the women are described as more gravitating towards the victims of crimes. In my experience, this isn’t really the case. Most true crime enthusiasts I know of are women and it’s not just because they empathize with the female victims. I’ve seen a few thrillers try to say it’s mainly men which is usually to push some agenda or theme, and it always takes me out of it because I don’t think it’s really true.
The Ending
The only part I didn’t really like about this book was the ending. It ends up trying to pull in too many things. It has a lot of call backs to things that were set up early on in the story, which I appreciated, but all of it together felt like too much. Like you could easily spoil Gone Girl in one sentence, this one would need at least a paragraph.
What it ends up saying happened is that there were basically two killers that night. There’s a subplot about the mother losing the family farm and home due to debt, and the son is also being accused of molestation, so she’s worried about money to save her home and defend her son. There is a mention earlier in the book about a group who is investigating a killer they call ‘The Angel of Debt’ who kills people who are in dire financial situations so that their family can inherit the insurance money. It’s revealed that he was hired by the mother to kill her and ended up killing one of the sisters too because she witnessed it.
(Also, this is revealed in a letter where she confirms she hired him to kill her, which looking back doesn’t make sense because I don’t think you’d get the insurance money if they found written proof that you hired someone to kill you…)
There’s another subplot where the brother has gotten his girlfriend pregnant and they need money to run away together so her parents won’t find out. While they are at his home looking for money to take, the eldest daughter sees them and realizes his brother’s girlfriend is pregnant. She threatens to tell their mother, so the girlfriend strangles her. Then afterward, they hide in the girls’ bedroom while the man kills the other two outside.
(Looking back on it, I also don’t really get why the girlfriend cared if people knew, because they were going to flee town anyway, so…)
It just felt a little like ‘what are the odds of this happening’ and got a little more convoluted than I would have liked. It kept going after this reveal too because Libby had to find a way to prove that the girlfriend had done it, which she ends up doing and getting her brother released from prison. Her brother had also assisted in a crime and in covering it up though, so was he really innocent?
I still enjoyed the story overall and the journey to the end, I just didn’t much care for the ending itself.
A Book in Three Acts 