Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn (Phoenix Fiction)
This is just some great, tight thriller writing.
Those last two sentences invite you to play detective, pick back through the scene for the other four lies. They set expectations which Flynn spends the next few hundred pages alternately reinforcing and confounding. But…
As a rule, I tend to pick out passages that are representative of the book as a whole. That isn’t the case here. To me, Gone Girl isn’t a great, tight thriller, though it may be presented as one. At its most effective, Gone Girl a horror story.
That horror is rooted in very mundane, universal fears. Fears about working in a collapsing industry, which in Gone Girl appears to be just about all of them. About being a bad person, deep down, and having to lie to ourselves and others. About how we appear when those lies fail or are overwhelmed by someone else’s.
Most of all, it’s a horror about the fragile unpredictability of love. The book sells Nick and Amy’s relationship without ever really lingering on its happy origins. Instead, the focus is on the couple a decade down the line, as each of those fears is methodically applied to show how they can cause love to dissipate, or to warp into something ugly and harmful.
