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Gone Girl review – David Fincher thrills with portrait of love gone wrong

Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck are today’s Bergman and Boyer in a twisted tale of murder, misogyny and a warped marriage Gone Girl star Ben Affleck: ‘Usually the protagonist is full of shit’ - video interview David Fincher on Gone Girl: ‘Bad things happen in this film …’

T he spirits of Highsmith and Hitchcock hover over this outrageous pulp suspense-thriller from David Fincher, episodically structured around twists and counter-twists, like an addictive boxset of a TV drama. The movie reminded me a little of Steven Bochco’s small-screen classic Murder One, or indeed House of Cards , the series Fincher produced and partly directed, which is a domestic study in media-political homicide. Gillian Flynn has adapted her bestselling page-turner for the screen, and it is stuffed with mysteries, cliffhangers and very enjoyable performances, along with some sleeping-with-the-enemy provocations and nightmares of misogyny. Rosamund Pike delivers a fascinatingly poised performance as the gone girl herself – the missing piece in a jigsaw of fear, but a character whose potency exponentially steps upward. With her sculpted beauty, Arctic blonde sexiness and wide, almost lidless stare, Pike is Tippi Hedren 2.0, expressing a desperate unhappiness beneath her flawless perfection.

She is Amy Dunne, a beautiful magazine writer married to fellow journalist Nick, played by Ben Affleck . Thanks to the recession they’ve been laid off from their jobs in New York and humiliatingly moved back to Nick’s hometown in the midwest, where he is forced to make ends meet by managing a bar with his acerbic sister, Margo (Carrie Coon). When Amy goes missing, Nick gives televised press conferences pleading for information about her. But the media decide that he appears to be insufficiently upset. The movie interleaves this situation with flashbacks from Amy’s diary, showing how their marriage had been unravelling and how career failure has turned Nick into a drinker with a violent temper. So the whisper begins: did this guy murder his wife?

Fincher creates a drumbeat of disquiet around this troubled relationship, making a movie that, before and after its rupture of violence, also behaves like any indie satire of suburban discontent, with bizarre, almost farcical, incidental detail. He is adroit at summoning up the looming, teetering anxiety and a presentiment of pure evil. This is explicit enough in Fincher’s movies such as Seven and Zodiac, but I always think there is something Mephistophelean, or at any rate Fincherean, in Sean Parker’s famous offer of undreamed-of wealth to the Facebook inventors in The Social Network : “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” That same whiff of sulphur is here.

There is a great scene, recounted in flashback from the viewpoint of Amy and her girlish, ingenuous diary, of their initial meeting. The couple get talking at a party, and Nick impulsively takes her out on a magical midnight stroll through the city, past a bakery where they get caught in a “sugar cloud”, which Nick wipes off Amy’s lips before he kisses her. That should be a wonderful memory, but it has been reconfigured by violence and the loss of innocence; Fincher demonstrates how the encounter is unbearably sinister in this new context, the sugar turned into a miasma. A little later, in the bright springtime of their relationship, the couple become humorously oppressed with the knowledge of how adorable they are: “We’re so cute I want to punch us in the face.” The director shows how the punch has only been temporarily withheld.

Fincher and Flynn work in subsidiary characters, whose lighter qualities are expertly judged, so the film does not become overloaded with horror, and so it can maintain its palatability and stamina over a two-and-a-half-hour running time. The investigating officer, Detective Rhonda Boney, is nicely played by Kim Dickens: a sceptical cop with a shrewd sense of when to rattle the suspect’s cage and when not to make an arrest. And Tyler Perry is very funny as Tanner Bolt, Nick’s gung-ho, media-savvy lawyer, always on the alert for how his client might manage the situation proactively, launching a faux-confessional aria on the very TV talk show that had pilloried him.

Another type of movie might take the mystery forward in just one or two more stages: Gone Girl has chicane plot reversals and switchbacks that Fincher pretty much keeps within the bounds of plausibility. Although the availability of a certain weapon finally challenges credibility, the movie never jumps the shark. Together, Affleck and Pike sell you on a very tense film. They are the 21st-century versions of Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in George Cukor’s Gaslight: tortured twin figures in a portrait of marriage and murder.

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What “Gone Girl” Is Really About

By Joshua Rothman

According to Anthony Lane, there are approximately “twenty-one people” who  haven’t read  Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl.” I’m one of them. This past weekend, when I saw the movie, I liked it so much that I felt sad about missing out on the book when it was published, two years ago. At the same time, “Gone Girl” seemed like one of those experiences to which the “cultural uncertainty principle” applies: you can read the book or you can see the movie, but you can’t fully embrace both versions, because they’ll occupy the same brain-space, obscuring one another. Basically, you have to choose an experience. The upside of my choice is that I enjoyed Fincher’s film on its own terms, in all its abstract, intellectual, postmodern glory.

The book version of “Gone Girl,” so I’ve heard, is a crime novel: an absorbing, ingenious thriller in which, halfway through, a big twist upends everything. (Spoiler alert: I plan to discuss that twist below.) Among the book’s many virtues, I’m told, is its concreteness. It’s not that the book is plausible, exactly, but that it’s full of texture and detail, both forensic and psychological. The events in the book make sense; the voices, thoughts, and actions of Nick and Amy seem like they could belong to real people.

None of that is true of David Fincher’s “Gone Girl.” Gillian Flynn may have written the screenplay, but the film is not interested in being convincing as a crime story. The movie crosses the thin line that divides genre fiction from postmodern fiction; it is decisively unreal, in the manner of “Fight Club”—a movie in which the actual and the symbolic occupied the same slice of reality. Its  characters are ciphers , its setting is perfunctory, and its violence is stylized. “Gone Girl” is what the critic Ted Gioia calls a “ postmodern mystery ”: it lets us luxuriate in the “reassuring heritage” of the traditional mystery, which feels like it’s building toward a tidy solution, even while we enjoy “the fun of toppling it over and watching the pieces fall where they may.”

As in many postmodern narratives, the heroes and villains in Fincher’s “Gone Girl” aren’t people but stories. We hope that the familiar, reassuring ones will win out (they don’t). In fact, the film is so self-aware that none of the stories it tells can be taken at face value. As my colleague Richard Brody has  written , the movie’s drama and characters have been streamlined so as to reveal their “underlying mythic power.” But “Gone Girl” is also anti-myth. When Amy (Rosamund Pike) says, of her plot against her husband, Nick (Ben Affleck), “That’s marriage,” you’re not supposed to believe her. If the myth of the perfect marriage is poisonous, then so is the myth of the continual “war of the sexes.” The question the movie asks is: Are there  any  stories that we can tell ourselves about marriage that ring true?

If that question sounds familiar, that’s because, in some ways, with “Gone Girl,” Fincher has returned to the structures of “Fight Club,” substituting a married couple for Tyler Durden and his gaggle of disenchanted bros. In both stories, the characters rebel against the unbearable myth of attainable perfection, substituting for it an alternative one of transcendent, authentic, freedom-giving destruction. “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need,” Tyler Durden says. “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t.” Durden’s response to his disillusionment with contemporary masculinity is to embrace a seductive, violent, and supposedly more genuine idea of “real” manliness—but that alternative turns out to be a disastrous illusion. In “Gone Girl,” it’s the mythos of coupledom, not the mythos of masculinity, that’s oppressive. But the imagined solution is the same: “We’re so cute I want to punch us in the face,” Amy says.

“Gone Girl,” in a sense, is “Fight Club” squared. To explore the positive and negative sides of the manliness myth, Fincher had only to propose a single character, a man with a “disassociated” personality (Brad Pitt’s enraged Tyler Durden is the alter ego of Edward Norton’s unnamed, milquetoast protagonist). “Gone Girl” demands two bifurcated people, each of whom must play both the victim and the aggressor. And the mythos of coupledom is more complex and troubled than the mythos of manliness. Even back in 1999, when “Fight Club” came out, there was something trumped-up and artificial about the idea that men were experiencing a crisis of masculine disenchantment. (The urgency of that crisis, if it did exist, certainly seems to have faded.) Coupledom, on the other hand, is and remains genuinely fraught territory. While our cultural imagination no longer fixates on the Great War or the Western frontier, the idea of the perfect couple (and, especially, the  perfect wife ) is still alive and well.

“Gone Girl” is fascinating because it gets at what is unsettling about coupledom: our suspicion that, in some fundamental sense, it necessarily entails victimization. Just as “Fight Club” showed that manliness and violence were imaginatively inseparable, “Gone Girl” raises the possibility that marriage and victimhood are inseparable, too. In real life, this is a widespread suspicion, sometimes justified, sometimes not. We’re more aware than ever of  the prevalence of hidden domestic abuse ; we’re cognizant of the widespread unfairness of the economic arrangements between men and women. We understand that marriages that look respectable can also hide a lot. At the same time, our concepts of masculinity and femininity—and of personhood, success, and freedom—have grown less compatible with the compromises of coupled life. The men’s and women’s magazines for which Nick and Amy worked tell us that our ideal selves are urban, maximally attractive, and maximally single, with absolute career freedom, no children, and plenty of time for the gym. To be in a couple, in short, is to be in a power relationship. And in power relationships, there are always winners and losers.

“Gone Girl” is especially good because it digs beneath these more-or-less legitimate concerns, exposing the irrational side of our fear of coupledom. In real life, as in the film, the tabloid media can’t wait to describe the home of every perfect couple as a lurid crime scene, haunted by cruelty, infidelity, and wickedness. “Gone Girl”—spoiler alert!—pulls the curtain back on the Victorian fears that drive those tabloid suspicions. When Amy is kidnapped by Desi Collings (Neil Patrick Harris), her wealthy ex-boyfriend, and locked up in his castle-like lake house, we get an old-style Gothic plot of female imprisonment. When it’s revealed that Amy has framed Nick, we get a classic tale about a manipulative, wicked woman who traps a hapless man in her web. These archetypal, gendered fantasy stories, the film suggests, contribute just as much to our suspicions about coupled life as our supposedly modern concerns about, say, work-life balance. Fincher’s “Gone Girl,” in its best scenes, travels all the way down into the id, revealing these inherited fears in sexy, bloody, sensational detail.

There’s a reason, of course, why the first rule of Fight Club is not to talk about Fight Club. It’s that the lurid core of our imaginative lives is best kept secret. When you see your dark fantasies realized in the light of day, there’s something absurd about them. And there’s something shameful, too: it becomes obvious that they’re rooted, to some degree, in narcissism. To be the victim of a manipulative madwoman, or to be abducted into a Gothic lair, is to suffer, but it’s also to be special, a hero or a heroine in your own way. That’s partly why we’re  fascinated with stories of victimhood —and why, especially in tabloid, cable-news culture, we endow victims with specialness, sanctity, and celebrity. “Gone Girl” asks whether genuine expressions of sympathy or solidarity with victims can ever happen without being infected by the  politicized , media-enabled “ cult of victimhood .” But it also digs a tunnel from that “cult” to our suspicions about marriage. Ordinarily, our concerns about the unfair compromises of married life seem entirely separate from our unseemly fascination with lurid, violent, Gothic victimization. But, in “Gone Girl,” those two imaginative mindsets are shown to be connected, perhaps even identical. Modern gender politics and Gothic fear are mixed together.

“Gone Girl” is a fantasy, of course, and it takes place in a dream world, not reality. Leaving the theatre, you have to ask yourself how connected these ideas are in real life. And you can’t miss the fact that, fundamentally, “Gone Girl” is a farce. There is no real crime or horror in the Dunne household. Amy and Nick hurt one another, but in unexceptional ways; Nick’s affair with a sexy student—Emily Ratajkowski, of the “Blurred Lines” music video—is played for comedy. In fact, it’s the creation of a heightened atmosphere of suspicion around those banal “crimes” that leads, eventually, to the real ones. Maybe “Gone Girl” is just playing around—making up, rather than finding, connections within our imaginative lives.

The same sort of question could be asked about “Fight Club,” too: Do young men  really  think that  growing comfortable with violence  is the only way to make sense of themselves? Surely that movie overstates things—but that doesn’t mean it isn’t onto something. Should “Gone Girl” convince you that our contemporary skepticism about marriage is rooted, ultimately, in our lurid, misguided, communal fantasy life? No. That said, sometimes you need a big pair of pliers to turn a tiny bolt. “Gone Girl” has resonated for a reason. It has found a creepy, confused, and troubling part of us, and expressed it.

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Despite some small mistakes, Gone Girl is an excellent suspense novel, with a well-developed mystery and some memorable – if disturbing – characters.

“ And they say marriage is such hard work, ” a character ironically reflects in a certain scene in Gone Girl . Gillian Flynn uses here a typical suspense structure to deconstruct the institution of marriage and, through the conflicts of deeply troubled characters, expose the difficulties of maintaining a long-lasting relationship.

On his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne receives the news that his wife, Amy Dunne, has disappeared. His living room was turned upside down, the street door is wide open and the cat waits for him alone on the stairs. Nick doesn’t have a convincing alibi, and the neighbors’ testimony to the police said the couple had quarreled the night before, which makes him the main suspect.

Gone Girl is narrated in the first person. Given the nature of the book, Flynn abuses the concept of the “unreliable narrator” to create an atmosphere of paranoia and tension. In an emblematic moment, Nick says: “ I’m a big fan of the lie of omission, ” and the warning for the reader couldn’t be clearer.

Flynn, however, is careful not to lie during the story. In crafting narratives of this kind, a careless author can end up making a common mistake: with the sole purpose of misleading the reader, they make innocent characters think of something suspicious and the guilty ones never reflect on their crimes, creating a dishonest narrative that, although serves its purpose at the moment, just needs a retrospective look to fall apart. To get around this problem, Flynn makes use of ambiguous situations to build suspense and keep the mystery alive without deceiving the reader.

At one point, Nick rebukes himself for appearing too calm and still reflects that he had lied to the police nine times during his interrogation, which raises the reader’s suspicion. But the character has already been characterized by his good looks, his lack of empathy, and his insistence on appearing like a good guy. That is, his lies could be due to him being guilty or due to his personality. Soon after revealing this information, Nick also reflects on the day his sister told him, “ You’d literally lie, cheat, and steal – hell, kill – to convince people you are a good guy. ” It is important to understand how the dual function of this accusation sustains the mystery: on the one hand, she might simply be justifying his lies, but on the other, she might be revealing his motivation for the murder of his wife.

The first half of Gone Girl is built on ambiguity, with countless dialogues and self-reflections assuming various roles in the narrative. In another instant, for example, Nick thinks “ The Amy of today was abrasive enough to want to hurt, sometimes, ” revealing how, even if he’s not guilty, Nick still has the makings of an abusive husband.

The book criticizes the kinds of behavior that can destroy a marriage. The story shows how the usual lack of communication and the aggressive internal disputes about who is right and who is not (when the best time of the day is when you prove to your partner that they were wrong all the time and that you told them so ) can infect and corrode a relationship. It shows how many marry an idea instead of a person, loving only the best aspects of their partner, idealizing them.

Although the reader begins to follow Nick’s point of view, Amy is Gone Girl ’s true protagonist, since her character arc is intrinsically linked to this problem. Her parents, for example, idealized her from the very beginning of her life, writing a series of books in her honor called “Amazing Amy”, in which the title character realizes all of her parents’ dreams – forcing Amy, in a passive-aggressive way, to strive to give her best too: “ And yet I can’t fail  to notice that whenever I screw something up, Amy does it right: When I finally quit violin at age twelve, Amy was revealed as a prodigy in the next book. (‘Sheesh, violin can be hard work, but hard work is the only way to get better!’) ”

Her parents’ strategy, as one would expect, had a terrible effect on Amy, making her embody the title of her child book – but in a twisted way. She has fun by assuming the image that corresponds to the idealized vision that other people have of her. At the same time, she considers herself absolutely perfect and superior to everyone – leading to an intensely arrogant view of the world.

This is inevitably reflected in her vision of marriage. Amy wants more than anything to prove to herself that her relationship is better than other people’s – who she calls “dancing monkeys” – without realizing that her actions bring her down to the same level: her last decision in the book, for example, is excellent in its irony, showing that she can’t escape the cliché of the desperate wife trying to save her marriage.

The narrative alternates between Amy’s point of view – with her diary – and Nick’s during the investigation, creating a parallel between the past and present of their relationship, while opposing the characters’ view on events. This can be observed in the contradiction between Nick’s dialogue during his chapter (“ Amy, I don’t get why I need to prove my love to you by remembering the exact same things you do, the exact same way you do. It doesn’t mean I don’t love our life together ” ) and a passage of Amy’s diary (“ I like to think I am confident and secure and mature enough to know Nick loves me without him constantly proving it ”).

The author is also brilliant in accentuating the disagreement between the characters. In Nick’s chapters, his feelings towards his wife start melancholic (“ She said these last words in a childish lilt that I once found fetching ”) but eventually move towards aggressive imagery (“ My wife was no longer my wife but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her ”). Meanwhile, in Amy’s point of view, her husband’s usual passivity and indifference sudden evolve into erratic and violent behavior.

But the mystery at the beginning of Gone Girl is not just about whether Nick is guilty or not. He is the main suspect for his wife’s disappearance, but several clues are positioned to indicate another conclusion: his insane father, who hates women, had fled the asylum on the same day; his sister Margo has too close of a relationship with him, suggesting a crime motivated by jealousy; a possessive ex-boyfriend of Amy appears during investigations and raises suspicions; even Amy herself could have orchestrated everything, since she is repeatedly described as intelligent, disciplined and capable of planning major acts in advance. Flynn opens up many possibilities for the reader to conduct their own investigation while using the ambiguity of sentences and situations to make that investigation more complex and rewarding.

The description of the environments also helps to build up the suspense. The dark atmosphere of the story, for example, is already present in an early description of Nick’s neighborhood: “ Driving into our development occasionally makes me shiver, the sheer number of gaping dark houses – homes that have never known inhabitants, or homes that have known owners and seen them ejected, the house standing triumphantly voided, humanless. ”

It is equally important to realize how the two main characters are never classified in a binary way. Both can be terrible and wonderful persons at different times, which makes their dynamic more complex. The result is a deeper analysis of their relationship, where the question of “who’s right and who’s wrong” so sought by the characters turns into an ever-changing battle.

However, when the main turning point of the story occurs, the narrative changes, quickly solving the “what happened?” mystery to move on to the consequences of the revelation. The twist is very important for the book because it intensifies the development of its core theme: if we were following the counterpoint of ideas between only Nick and Amy, now we receive a third view on the events. Extremely cynical and perverse, this new perspective is responsible for removing us from our comfort zone, making the tone of the story even more suffocating.

Gone Girl only falters during the last moments of the third act, which can feel a little anticlimactic due to some characters simply “giving up”. In addition, there are still some small plot holes in the story, such as Nick managing to hire, amidst serious financial problems, a famous lawyer, whose commission reaches a hundred thousand dollars.

Despite these small mistakes, Gone Girl is an excellent suspense novel, with a well-developed mystery and some memorable – if disturbing – characters. Marriage can be difficult, for sure, but one must remain hopeful that it doesn’t end this way.

November 27, 2019.

Review originally published in Portuguese on September 30, 2014.

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Gone Girl Review: Wicked Fun in David Fincher’s Faithful Adaptation

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“Gone Girl” opens October 3.

Justin Chang, Variety

This taut yet expansive psychological thriller represents an exceptional pairing of filmmaker and material, fully expressing Fincher’s cynicism about the information age and his abiding fascination with the terror and violence lurking beneath the surfaces of contemporary American life. Graced with a mordant wit as dry and chilled as a good Chablis, as well as outstanding performances from Ben Affleck and a revelatory  Rosamund Pike , Fox’s Oct. 3 wide release should push past its preordained Oscar-contender status to galvanize the mainstream.

Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out

Transformed into the kind of wickedly confident Hollywood thriller you pray to see once in a decade, Gillian Flynn’s absorbing missing-wife novel emerges — via a faithful script by the author herself — as the stealthiest comedy since “American Psycho.” It’s a hypnotically perverse film, one that redeems your faith in studio smarts (but not, alas, in local law enforcement, tabloid crime reporting or, indeed, marriage). 

Robbie Collin, Telegraph

In Fincher’s hands, that smart but arguably undisciplined story becomes something even wilder and yet perversely also more controlled — a neo-noir thriller turned on its blood-spattered head. Here, it’s the  homme , rather than the  femme , who has the  fatale  aura, and what comes out of the past only serves to further cloud the murky present.

Geoffrey Macnab,  Independent

An immensely slippery, deceptive affair — and that’s what makes it so pleasurable. It’s a story in which the manipulation of the main characters by one another is matched by that of the audience by the filmmakers. The rug is continually being pulled from under our feet.

James Rocchi,  the Wrap

After the dour, sour, sadistic Scandanavian misfire of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” it’s a pleasure to note that Fincher’s latest adaptation, of Gillian Flynn’s best-selling novel of the same name, is both wicked and wickedly fun. Not only brutal but also brutally funny, “Gone Girl” mixes top-notch suspenseful storytelling with the kind of razor-edged wit that slashes so quick and clean you’re still watching the blade go past before you notice you’re bleeding.

Xan Brooks,  Guardian

“Gone Girl,” finally, may be no more than a storm in a teacup. But what an elegant, bone-china teacup this is. And what a fearsome force-10 gale we have brewing inside.

David Edelstein,  Vulture

The movie is phenomenally gripping — although it does leave you queasy, uncertain what to take away on the subject of men, women, marriage, and the possibility of intimacy from the example of such prodigiously messed-up people. Though a woman wrote the script, the male gaze dominates, and this particular male — the director of “Se7en” and “The Social Network”— doesn’t have much faith in appearances, particularly women’s. Fincher’s is a world of masks, misrepresentations, subtle and vast distortions. Truth is rarely glimpsed. Media lie. Surfaces lie.

Graham Fuller,  Screen International

Less visceral in the main than most Fincher films, save “The Social Network,” “Gone Girl” is stylistically restrained, but for a few poetic touches (such as a cloud of sugar that dusts Amy with mystery). “Psycho” is a touchstone (as is “Body Heat”), though Fincher utilises suspense as a smokescreen for social critiquing.

Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter

With a screenplay by the novelist herself, David Fincher’s film of “Gone Girl,” Gillian Flynn’s twisty, nasty and sensational best-seller, is a sharply made, perfectly cast and unfailingly absorbing melodrama. But, like the director’s adaptation of another publishing phenomenon,” The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” three years ago, it leaves you with a quietly lingering feeling of: “Is that all there is?”

Michael Nordine, Indiewire

In its incremental reveal of key details and wrenching scenes of townsfolk fruitlessly combing the landscape for someone who isn’t there, “Gone Girl” is sporadically reminiscent of “Exotica” and even the original “Paradise Lost” documentary. Still, it’s hard to shake the notion that he could be doing something more rewarding than becoming the preeminent director of airport-novel adaptations, a trajectory that’s all the more disappointing after the trifecta of “Zodiac,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” and “The Social Network.”

In full accord w/ @justincchang : GONE GIRL is an exhilarating, pitch-black marital comedy; Fincher’s EYES WIDE SHUT; the movie of the year. — Scott Foundas (@foundasonfilm) September 22, 2014

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BookBrowse Reviews Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

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The perfect novel for readers looking for fast-paced escapism.

On its surface, Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl appears to be a run-of-the-mill mystery with a relatively standard plot: On the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne gets a call at work from a concerned neighbor: his front door is wide open.  Nick rushes home to find a tea kettle boiled to nothing on the stove, furniture overturned in his living room and his wife Amy missing. He of course calls the police, who immediately begin investigating the disappearance as a crime. The novel follows the course of the investigation as more and more evidence leads them to believe Nick has murdered his wife. This somewhat average synopsis, however, belies the book's uniquely complex story and the deliciously evil plot twists that elevate it from common pot-boiler to "oh my gosh you must read this now " status. The story is alternately told by Nick and Amy. Nick's voice remains a first-person account throughout, relaying the current state of the investigation into Amy's disappearance.  We know even before Amy goes missing that all is not right with their relationship. Nick muses early on in the novel, "There's something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold." He describes his reaction to his wife's cheery greeting on the morning she disappears: "Bile and dread inched up my throat." He also admits to us that he is lying to the police, although not about what, exactly. It's immediately obvious that Nick is an unreliable narrator and that we, his audience, should not trust him. The other voice is Amy's, first in diary entries covering the five year period from her meeting Nick through her disappearance, and later her own first-person account of events as they unfold. Here, too, it's painfully obvious that their marriage is the very picture of dysfunction. The gradual decline in the couple's relationship as chronicled from each person's point of view adds a certain amount of depth to the narrative, particularly throughout the first section of the novel. The author excels at illustrating the collapse of a one-time loving relationship into a nightmare for which each party bears responsibility. Little more can be said about the plot without including spoilers. Suffice it to say, it's a roller-coaster ride with enough surprises along the way to keep even the most jaded mystery reader absorbed. My one criticism is that Flynn is not very subtle about how she wants you to feel about her characters; I felt manipulated - almost manhandled - into reacting to the characters in specific ways at key points in the plot. All authors, of course, guide a reader's feelings, but when it's too overt it becomes a distraction. Those who read for style as much as plot may find this outweighs their enjoyment of the novel, but those who are simply looking for a terrifically entertaining page-turner will likely be too engrossed to notice. On finishing Gone Girl I immediately contacted my friends to insist they read it; it's one of those books that I simply couldn't wait to discuss with others.  I found it to be an original, engaging mystery that kept me guessing throughout. It's the perfect novel for readers looking for fast-paced escapism.

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A novel of suspense that explores the complexities of marriage and the dangerous truths we ignore in the name of love.

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By Marilyn Stasio

• June 15, 2012

“This is the hardest part,” confides one of the untrustworthy narrators in GONE GIRL (Crown, $25), “waiting for stupid people to figure things out.” There’s no need to rub it in, because Gillian Flynn’s latest novel of psychological suspense will confound anyone trying to keep up with her quicksilver mind and diabolical rules of play. Not that there’s anything underhanded about her intentions: she promises to deliver an account of the troubled marriage of Nick and Amy Dunne, who alternate as narrators, and so she does. The trickery is in the devilish way she tells their story.

On the occasion of this young couple’s fifth wedding anniversary, Nick tries to ignore the big questions weighing on his mind (“What have we done to each other? What will we do?”) and steels himself for the elaborate and humiliating treasure hunt his wife always makes of her gift presentation. But Nick’s brooding takes a darker turn when Amy disappears, amid signs of a struggle, from their house on the Mississippi River in North Carthage, Mo., and he suffers the painful transformation from distressed husband to suspected murderer.

Amy shares the narrative with Nick through giddy diary entries that date back to their first meeting at a party in Brooklyn and sharpen all the character traits blunted by five years of marriage. In those days, handsome, easygoing Nick wrote about pop culture for a men’s magazine, and beautiful, brainy Amy drew on her master’s degree in psychology to compose personality quizzes for the women’s market. But after losing their jobs in the publishing industry meltdown, Nick moved them to his backwater hometown and used the last of Amy’s trust fund to open a bar with his twin sister. Although he made a good case (“The world will always want a drink”), Nick comes to regret detaching his urbane wife from her natural habitat.

What makes Flynn so fearless a writer is the way she strips her characters of their pretenses and shows no mercy while they squirm. Nick would rather be arrested than reveal that he keeps old copies of his magazine articles hidden in a garage to read in secret, “like porn.” Amy would never give Nick the satisfaction of knowing that her treasure hunts are a cruel way of asserting her superior intelligence. Flynn dares the reader to figure out which instances of marital discord might flare into a homicidal rage.

Stories about dysfunctional families are boring. Stories about dysfunctional crime families are not. Terrier Rand, the protagonist of Tom Piccirilli’s caustic thriller THE LAST KIND WORDS (Bantam, $26), comes from a family of professional thieves named after (and bearing tattoos of) dogs. Terry’s father, Pinscher, is the alpha male in this kennel, but his brothers Malamute and Greyhound have their talents, and even Grandpa Shep, who is gaga, can still lift a wallet. But the one who drags Terry away from his honest work on a ranch is his older brother, Collie, due to be executed in two weeks for murdering eight people. Collie won’t explain why he disgraced the family by going psycho, but he insists he had nothing to do with one of these deaths and talks Terry into hunting down the actual killer.

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Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn: A Gripping Psychological Thriller - Book Review

• Author: Admin
• March 03, 2024

Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” is a novel that expertly intertwines elements of mystery, psychological thriller, and drama, creating a gripping narrative that keeps readers on the edge of their seats. Since its release, it has not only topped bestseller lists but also sparked discussions and debates among literary enthusiasts and casual readers alike. This review delves into the intricate layers of Flynn’s storytelling, dissecting the elements that make “Gone Girl” a modern classic in the thriller genre.

The novel opens with the disappearance of Amy Dunne, which occurs on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary. Her husband, Nick Dunne, becomes the prime suspect in what appears to be a disturbing case of foul play. Flynn narrates the story from alternating perspectives – Nick's account of the present events, and Amy's diary entries leading up to her disappearance. This narrative style is ingenious, as it allows the reader to immerse themselves in the psyche of both protagonists, building a complex picture of their marriage.

Flynn’s writing is razor-sharp, characterized by its precision and ability to evoke a range of emotions. The author masterfully crafts the personalities of Nick and Amy, making them both relatable and detestable at different points in the story. This duality is one of the novel’s greatest strengths, as it continually forces readers to reevaluate their sympathies and theories about the characters' true natures.

The plot of “Gone Girl” is a labyrinth of twists and turns, each more unexpected than the last. Just when the reader thinks they have a grasp on the direction of the story, Flynn introduces a new revelation that completely upends their expectations. This unpredictability is a testament to Flynn's skill as a storyteller and her deep understanding of the thriller genre. The pacing is impeccable, with a slow, tension-building start that escalates into a frenetic, heart-pounding climax.

One of the most compelling aspects of “Gone Girl” is its exploration of themes such as media influence, the psychology of relationships, and the facades people present to the world. The way Flynn depicts the media circus surrounding Amy’s disappearance and Nick’s vilification is particularly striking, offering a biting commentary on modern society’s obsession with sensational news and the court of public opinion.

Furthermore, Flynn delves into the complexities of marriage and the often-discrepancy between perception and reality. Through Nick and Amy's tumultuous relationship, the novel exposes the darker side of love and the lengths people will go to maintain an image of perfection. This exploration is nuanced and thought-provoking, adding a layer of depth to the narrative that transcends the typical thriller.

However, “Gone Girl” is not without its controversies. Some readers have critiqued the book for its portrayal of its female characters, particularly in the context of gender stereotypes and mental health. While these criticisms are valid and contribute to a broader discussion, they also underscore Flynn's ability to provoke and challenge her audience, a hallmark of great literature.

In conclusion, “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn is a masterclass in thriller writing. It combines a tightly woven plot, complex characters, and a deep exploration of contemporary themes to create a novel that is both entertaining and intellectually stimulating. Its impact on the genre is undeniable, and it has set a high bar for psychological thrillers. Whether you are a fan of the genre or a newcomer, “Gone Girl” is a book that should not be missed, offering a reading experience that is as thought-provoking as it is thrilling.

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Gillian Flynn ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 5, 2012

One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are...

A perfect wife’s disappearance plunges her husband into a nightmare as it rips open ugly secrets about his marriage and, just maybe, his culpability in her death.

Even after they lost their jobs as magazine writers and he uprooted her from New York and spirited her off to his childhood home in North Carthage, Mo., where his ailing parents suddenly needed him at their side, Nick Dunne still acted as if everything were fine between him and his wife, Amy. His sister Margo, who’d gone partners with him on a local bar, never suspected that the marriage was fraying, and certainly never knew that Nick, who’d buried his mother and largely ducked his responsibilities to his father, stricken with Alzheimer’s, had taken one of his graduate students as a mistress. That’s because Nick and Amy were both so good at playing Mr. and Ms. Right for their audience. But that all changes the morning of their fifth anniversary when Amy vanishes with every indication of foul play. Partly because the evidence against him looks so bleak, partly because he’s so bad at communicating grief, partly because he doesn’t feel all that grief-stricken to begin with, the tide begins to turn against Nick. Neighbors who’d been eager to join the police in the search for Amy begin to gossip about him. Female talk-show hosts inveigh against him. The questions from Detective Rhonda Boney and Detective Jim Gilpin get sharper and sharper. Even Nick has to acknowledge that he hasn’t come close to being the husband he liked to think he was. But does that mean he deserves to get tagged as his wife’s killer? Interspersing the mystery of Amy’s disappearance with flashbacks from her diary, Flynn ( Dark Places , 2009, etc.) shows the marriage lumbering toward collapse—and prepares the first of several foreseeable but highly effective twists.

Pub Date: June 5, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-307-58836-4

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: April 22, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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BOOK REVIEW

by Gillian Flynn

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SEEN & HEARD

A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection , 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | SUSPENSE | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER

More by Kathy Reichs

by Kathy Reichs

by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2015

A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...

Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series ( Stone Cold , 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.

Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.

Pub Date: July 28, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Minotaur

Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015

GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

More by C.J. Box

by C.J. Box

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First Reads

Exclusive first read: 'gone girl' by gillian flynn, part one "boy loses girl".

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Darkly funny, suspenseful and cunningly plotted, Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl will be published June 5. In this exclusive selection from the book's opening, we meet Nick and Amy, the seemingly perfect couple whose alternating chapters soon reveal them to be as unreliable as spouses as they are as narrators.

When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. The very first time I saw her, it was the back of the head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head. You could imagine the skull quite easily.

I'd know her head anywhere.

And what's inside it. I think of that too: her mind. Her brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic centipedes. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspool­ing her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts. What are you thinking, Amy? The question I've asked most often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who could answer. I suppose these questions stormcloud over every marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?

My eyes flipped open at exactly six a.m. This was no avian flutter­ing of the lashes, no gentle blink toward consciousness. The awaken­ing was mechanical. A spooky ventriloquist-dummy click of the lids: The world is black and then, showtime! 6-0-0 the clock said—in my face, first thing I saw. 6-0-0. It felt different. I rarely woke at such a rounded time. I was a man of jagged risings: 8:43, 11:51, 9:26. My life was alarmless.

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At that exact moment, 6-0-0, the sun climbed over the skyline of oaks, revealing its full summer angry-god self. Its reflection flared across the river toward our house, a long, blaring finger aimed at me through our frail bedroom curtains. Accusing: You have been seen. You will be seen.

I wallowed in bed, which was our New York bed in our new house, which we still called the new house, even though we'd been back here for two years. It's a rented house right along the Mississippi River, a house that screams Suburban Nouveau Riche, the kind of place I aspired to as a kid from my split-level, shag-carpet side of town. The kind of house that is immediately familiar: a generically grand, unchallenging, new, new, new house that my wife would—and did—detest.

"Should I remove my soul before I come inside?" Her first line upon arrival. It had been a compromise: Amy demanded we rent, not buy, in my little Missouri hometown, in her firm hope that we wouldn't be stuck here long. But the only houses for rent were clustered in this failed development: a miniature ghost town of bank-owned, recession-busted, price-reduced mansions, a neighborhood that closed before it ever opened. It was a compromise, but Amy didn't see it that way, not in the least. To Amy, it was a punishing whim on my part, a nasty, selfish twist of the knife. I would drag her, caveman-style, to a town she had aggressively avoided, and make her live in the kind of house she used to mock. I suppose it's not a compromise if only one of you considers it such, but that was what our compromises tended to look like. One of us was always angry. Amy, usually.

Do not blame me for this particular grievance, Amy. The Missouri Grievance. Blame the economy, blame bad luck, blame my parents, blame your parents, blame the Internet, blame people who use the Internet. I used to be a writer. I was a writer who wrote about TV and movies and books. Back when people read things on paper, back when anyone cared about what I thought. I'd arrived in New York in the late '90s, the last gasp of the glory days, although no one knew it then. New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publish­ing world—throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash, oh quite cute, it definitely won't kill us in the night. Think about it: a time when newly graduated college kids could come to New York and get paid to write. We had no clue that we were embarking on careers that would vanish within a decade.

I had a job for eleven years and then I didn't, it was that fast. All around the country, magazines began shuttering, succumbing to a sudden infection brought on by the busted economy. Writers (my kind of writers: aspiring novelists, ruminative thinkers, people whose brains don't work quick enough to blog or link or tweet, basically old, stubborn blowhards) were through. We were like women's hat makers or buggy-whip manufacturers: Our time was done. Three weeks after I got cut loose, Amy lost her job, such as it was. (Now I can feel Amy looking over my shoulder, smirking at the time I've spent discussing my career, my misfortune, and dismissing her experience in one sen­tence. That, she would tell you, is typical. Just like Nick, she would say. It was a refrain of hers: Just like Nick to . . . and whatever followed, whatever was just like me, was bad.) Two jobless grown-ups, we spent weeks wandering around our Brooklyn brownstone in socks and paja­mas, ignoring the future, strewing unopened mail across tables and sofas, eating ice cream at ten a.m. and taking thick afternoon naps.

Then one day the phone rang. My twin sister was on the other end. Margo had moved back home after her own New York layoff a year before—the girl is one step ahead of me in everything, even shitty luck. Margo, calling from good ole North Carthage, Missouri, from the house where we grew up, and as I listened to her voice, I saw her at age ten, with a dark cap of hair and overall shorts, sitting on our grandparents' back dock, her body slouched over like an old pillow, her skinny legs dangling in the water, watching the river flow over fish-white feet, so intently, utterly self-possessed even as a child.

Go's voice was warm and crinkly even as she gave this cold news: Our indomitable mother was dying. Our dad was nearly gone—his (nasty) mind, his (miserable) heart, both murky as he meandered toward the great gray beyond. But it looked like our mother would beat him there. About six months, maybe a year, she had. I could tell that Go had gone to meet with the doctor by herself, taken her studi­ous notes in her slovenly handwriting, and she was teary as she tried to decipher what she'd written. Dates and doses.

"Well, fuck, I have no idea what this says, is it a nine? Does that even make sense?" she said, and I interrupted. Here was a task, a purpose, held out on my sister's palm like a plum. I almost cried with relief.

"I'll come back, Go. We'll move back home. You shouldn't have to do this all by yourself."

She didn't believe me. I could hear her breathing on the other end.

"I'm serious, Go. Why not? There's nothing here."

A long exhale. "What about Amy?"

That is what I didn't take long enough to consider. I simply assumed I would bundle up my New York wife with her New York interests, her New York pride, and remove her from her New York parents—leave the frantic, thrilling futureland of Manhattan behind—and transplant her to a little town on the river in Missouri, and all would be fine.

I did not yet understand how foolish, how optimistic, how, yes, just like Nick I was for thinking this. The misery it would lead to.

"Amy will be fine. Amy . . ." Here was where I should have said, "Amy loves Mom." But I couldn't tell Go that Amy loved our mother, because after all that time, Amy still barely knew our mother. Their few meetings had left them both baffled. Amy would dissect the con­versations for days after—"And what did she mean by . . ."—as if my mother were some ancient peasant tribeswoman arriving from the tundra with an armful of raw yak meat and some buttons for barter­ing, trying to get something from Amy that wasn't on offer.

Amy didn't care to know my family, didn't want to know my birthplace, and yet for some reason, I thought moving home would be a good idea.

My morning breath warmed the pillow, and I changed the subject in my mind. Today was not a day for second-guessing or regret, it was a day for doing. Downstairs, I could hear the return of a long-lost sound: Amy making breakfast. Banging wooden cupboards (rump-thump!), rattling containers of tin and glass (ding-ring!), shuffling and sorting a collection of metal pots and iron pans (ruzz-shuzz!). A culinary orchestra tuning up, clattering vigorously toward the finale, a cake pan drumrolling along the floor, hitting the wall with a cymballic crash. Something impressive was being created, probably a crepe, because crepes are special, and today Amy would want to cook some­thing special.

It was our five-year anniversary.

I walked barefoot to the edge of the steps and stood listening, working my toes into the plush wall-to-wall carpet Amy detested on principle, as I tried to decide whether I was ready to join my wife. Amy was in the kitchen, oblivious to my hesitation. She was humming something melancholy and familiar. I strained to make it out—a folk song? a lullabye?—and then realized it was the theme to M.A.S.H. Suicide is painless. I went downstairs.

I hovered in the doorway, watching my wife. Her yellow-butter hair was pulled up, the hank of ponytail swinging cheerful as a jump-rope, and she was sucking distractedly on a burnt fingertip, hum­ming around it. She hummed to herself because she was an unrivaled botcher of lyrics. When we were first dating, a Genesis song came on the radio: "She seems to have an invisible touch, yeah." And Amy crooned instead, "She takes my hat and puts it on the top shelf." When I asked her why she'd ever think her lyrics were remotely, pos­sibly, vaguely right, she told me she always thought the woman in the song truly loved the man because she put his hat on the top shelf. I knew I liked her then, really liked her, this girl with an explanation for everything.

There's something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.

Amy peered at the crepe sizzling in the pan and licked something off her wrist. She looked triumphant, wifely. If I took her in my arms, she would smell like berries and powdered sugar.

When she spied me lurking there in grubby boxers, my hair in full Heat Miser spike, she leaned against the kitchen counter and said, "Well, hello, handsome."

Bile and dread inched up my throat. I thought to myself: Okay, go.

I was very late getting to work. My sister and I had done a foolish thing when we both moved back home. We had done what we always talked about doing. We opened a bar. We borrowed money from Amy to do this, eighty thousand dollars, which was once nothing to Amy but by then was almost everything. I swore I would pay her back, with interest. I would not be a man who borrowed from his wife—I could feel my dad twisting his lips at the very idea. Well, there are all kinds of men, his most damning phrase, the second half left unsaid, and you are the wrong kind.

But truly, it was a practical decision, a smart business move. Amy and I both needed new careers; this would be mine. She would pick one someday, or not, but in the meantime, here was an income, made possible by the last of Amy's trust fund. Like the McMansion I rented, the bar featured symbolically in my childhood memories—a place where only grown-ups go, and do whatever grown-ups do. Maybe that's why I was so insistent on buying it after being stripped of my livelihood. It's a reminder that I am, after all, an adult, a grown man, a useful human being, even though I lost the career that made me all these things. I won't make that mistake again: The once plenti­ful herds of magazine writers would continue to be culled—by the Internet, by the recession, by the American public, who would rather watch TV or play video games or electronically inform friends that, like, rain sucks! But there's no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink.

Our bar is a corner bar with a haphazard, patchwork aesthetic. Its best feature is a massive Victorian back bar, dragon heads and angel faces emerging from the oak—an extravagant work of wood in these shitty plastic days. The remainder of the bar is, in fact, shitty, a show­case of the shabbiest design offerings of every decade: an Eisenhower-era linoleum floor, the edges turned up like burnt toast; dubious wood-paneled walls straight from a '70s home-porn video; halogen floor lamps, an accidental tribute to my 1990s dorm room. The ulti­mate effect is strangely homey—it looks less like a bar than some­one's benignly neglected fixer-upper. And jovial: We share a parking lot with the local bowling alley, and when our door swings wide, the clatter of strikes applauds the customer's entrance.

We named the bar The Bar. "People will think we're ironic instead of creatively bankrupt," my sister reasoned.

Yes, we thought we were being clever New Yorkers—that the name was a joke no one else would really get, not get like we did. Not meta -get. We pictured the locals scrunching their noses: Why'd you name it The Bar ? But our first customer, a gray-haired woman in bifocals and a pink jogging suit, said, "I like the name. Like in Break­fast at Tiffany's and Audrey Hepburn's cat was named Cat."

We felt much less superior after that, which was a good thing.

I pulled into the parking lot. I waited until a strike erupted from the bowling alley— thank you, thank you, friends —then stepped out of the car. I admired the surroundings, still not bored with the broken-in view: the squatty blond-brick post office across the street (now closed on Saturdays), the unassuming beige office building just down the way (now closed, period). The town wasn't prosperous, not anymore, not by a long shot. Hell, it wasn't even original, being one of two Carthage, Missouris—ours is technically North Carthage, which makes it sound like a twin city, although it's hundreds of miles from the other and the lesser of the two: a quaint little 1950s town that bloated itself into a basic midsize suburb and dubbed it progress. Still, it was where my mom grew up and where she raised me and Go, so it had some history. Mine, at least.

As I walked toward the bar across the concrete-and-weed parking lot, I looked straight down the road and saw the river. That's what I've always loved about our town: We aren't built on some safe bluff overlooking the Mississippi—we are on the Mississippi. I could walk down the road and step right into the sucker, an easy three-foot drop, and be on my way to Tennessee. Every building downtown bears hand-drawn lines from where the river hit during the Flood of '61,'75, '84, '93, '07, '08, '11. And so on.

The river wasn't swollen now, but it was running urgently, in strong ropy currents. Moving apace with the river was a long single-file line of men, eyes aimed at their feet, shoulders tense, walking steadfastly nowhere. As I watched them, one suddenly looked up at me, his face in shadow, an oval blackness. I turned away.

I felt an immediate, intense need to get inside. By the time I'd gone twenty feet, my neck bubbled with sweat. The sun was still an angry eye in the sky. You have been seen.

My gut twisted, and I moved quicker. I needed a drink.

AMY ELLIOTT

January 8, 2005

-- Diary Entry --

Tra and la! I am smiling a big adopted-orphan smile as I write this. I am embarrassed at how happy I am, like some Technicolor comic of a teenage girl talking on the phone with my hair in a ponytail, the bubble above my head saying: I met a boy!

But I did. This is a technical, empirical truth. I met a boy, a great, gorgeous dude, a funny, cool-ass guy. Let me set the scene, because it deserves setting for posterity (no, please, I'm not that far gone, pos­terity! feh). But still. It's not New Year's, but still very much the new year. It's winter: early dark, freezing cold.

Carmen, a newish friend—semi-friend, barely friend, the kind of friend you can't cancel on—has talked me into going out to Brook­lyn, to one of her writers' parties. Now, I like a writer party, I like writers, I am the child of writers, I am a writer. I still love scribbling that word—WRITER—anytime a form, questionnaire, document asks for my occupation. Fine, I write personality quizzes, I don't write about the Great Issues of the Day, but I think it's fair to say I am a writer. I'm using this journal to get better: to hone my skills, to collect details and observations. To show don't tell and all that other writery crap. ( Adopted-orphan smile, I mean, that's not bad, come on.) But really, I do think my quizzes alone qualify me on at least an honorary basis. Right?

At a party you find yourself surrounded by genuine talented writ­ers, employed at high-profile, respected newspapers and magazines.

You merely write quizzes for women's rags. When someone asks what you do for a living, you:

a) Get embarrassed and say, "I'm just a quiz writer, it's silly stuff!"

b) Go on the offense: "I'm a writer now, but I'm considering something more challenging and worthwhile—why, what do you do?"

c) Take pride in your accomplishments: "I write personality quizzes using the knowledge gleaned from my master's degree in psychology—oh, and fun fact: I am the inspiration for a beloved children's-book series, I'm sure you know it, Amazing Amy? Yeah, so suck it, snobdouche!

Answer: C, totally C

Anyway, the party is being thrown by one of Carmen's good friends who writes about movies for a movie magazine, and is very funny, according to Carmen. I worry for a second that she wants to set us up: I am not interested in being set up. I need to be ambushed, caught unawares, like some sort of feral love- jackal. I'm too self-conscious otherwise. I feel myself trying to be charming, and then I realize I'm obviously trying to be charming, and then I try to be even more charming to make up for the fake charm, and then I've basically turned into Liza Minnelli: I'm dancing in tights and sequins, begging you to love me. There's a bowler and jazz hands and lots of teeth.

But no, I realize, as Carmen gushes on about her friend: She likes him. Good.

We climb three flights of warped stairs and walk into a whoosh of body heat and writerness: many black-framed glasses and mops of hair; faux western shirts and heathery turtlenecks; black wool pea-coats flopped all across the couch, puddling to the floor; a German poster for The Getaway ( Ihre Chance war gleich Null! ) covering one paint-cracked wall. Franz Ferdinand on the stereo: "Take Me Out."

A clump of guys hovers near a card table where all the alcohol is set up, tipping more booze into their cups after every few sips, all too aware of how little is left to go around. I nudge in, aiming my plastic cup in the center like a busker, get a clatter of ice cubes and a splash of vodka from a sweet-faced guy wearing a Space Invaders T-shirt.

A lethal-looking bottle of green-apple liqueur, the host's ironic purchase, will soon be our fate unless someone makes a booze run, and that seems unlikely, as everyone clearly believes they made the run last time. It is a January party, definitely, everyone still glutted and sugar-pissed from the holidays, lazy and irritated simultane­ously. A party where people drink too much and pick cleverly worded fights, blowing cigarette smoke out an open window even after the host asks them to go outside. We've already talked to one another at a thousand holiday parties, we have nothing left to say, we are col­lectively bored, but we don't want to go back into the January cold; our bones still ache from the subway steps.

I have lost Carmen to her host-beau—they are having an intense discussion in a corner of the kitchen, the two of them hunching their shoulders, their faces toward each other, the shape of a heart. Good. I think about eating to give myself something to do besides standing in the center of the room, smiling like the new kid in the lunchroom. But almost everything is gone. Some potato-chip shards sit in the bottom of a giant Tupperware bowl. A supermarket deli tray full of hoary carrots and gnarled celery and a semeny dip sits untouched on a cof­fee table, cigarettes littered throughout like bonus vegetable sticks. I am doing my thing, my impulse thing: What if I leap from the theater balcony right now? What if I tongue the homeless man across from me on the subway? What if I sit down on the floor of this party by myself and eat everything on that deli tray, including the cigarettes?

"Please don't eat anything in that area," he says. It is him (bum bum BUMMM!), but I don't yet know it's him (bum-bum-bummm). I know it's a guy who will talk to me, he wears his cockiness like an ironic T-shirt, but it fits him better. He is the kind of guy who carries himself like he gets laid a lot, a guy who likes women, a guy who would actually fuck me properly. I would like to be fucked properly! My dating life seems to rotate around three types of men: preppy Ivy Leaguers who believe they're characters in a Fitzgerald novel; slick Wall Streeters with money signs in their eyes, their ears, their mouths; and sensitive smart-boys who are so self-aware that everything feels like a joke. The Fitzgerald fellows tend to be inef­fectively porny in bed, a lot of noise and acrobatics to very little end. The finance guys turn rageful and flaccid. The smart-boys fuck like they're composing a piece of math rock: This hand strums around here, and then this finger offers a nice bass rhythm. . . . I sound quite slutty, don't I? Pause while I count how many . . . eleven. Not bad. I've always thought twelve was a solid, reasonable number to end at.

"Seriously," Number 12 continues. (Ha!) "Back away from the tray. James has up to three other food items in his refrigerator. I could make you an olive with mustard. Just one olive, though."

Just one olive, though. It is a line that is only a little funny, but it already has the feel of an inside joke, one that will get funnier with nostalgic repetition. I think: A year from now, we will be walking along the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset and one of us will whisper, "Just one olive, though," and we'll start to laugh. (Then I catch myself. Awful. If he knew I was doing a year from now already, he'd run and I'd be obliged to cheer him on.)

Mainly, I will admit, I smile because he's gorgeous. Distractingly gorgeous, the kind of looks that make your eyes pinwheel, that make you want to just address the elephant—"You know you're gorgeous, right?"—and move on with the conversation. I bet dudes hate him: He looks like the rich-boy villain in an '80s teen movie—the one who bullies the sensitive misfit, the one who will end up with a pie in the puss, the whipped cream wilting his upturned collar as everyone in the cafeteria cheers.

He doesn't act that way, though. His name is Nick. I love it. It makes him seem nice, and regular, which he is. When he tells me his name, I say, "Now, that's a real name." He brightens and reels off some line: "Nick's the kind of guy you can drink a beer with, the kind of guy who doesn't mind if you puke in his car. Nick!"

He makes a series of awful puns. I catch three-fourths of his movie references. Two-thirds, maybe. (Note to self: Rent The Sure Thing. ) He refills my drink without me having to ask, somehow ferreting out one last cup of the good stuff. He has claimed me, placed a flag in me: I was here first, she's mine, mine. It feels nice, after my recent series of nervous, respectful post-feminist men, to be a territory. He has a great smile, a cat's smile. He should cough out yellow Tweety Bird feathers, the way he smiles at me. He doesn't ask what I do for a living, which is fine, which is a change. (I'm a writer, did I mention?) He talks to me in his river-wavy Missouri accent; he was born and raised outside of Hannibal, the boyhood home of Mark Twain, the inspiration for Tom Sawyer. He tells me he worked on a steamboat when he was a teenager, dinner and jazz for the tourists. And when I laugh (bratty, bratty New York girl who has never ventured to those big unwieldy middle states, those States Where Many Other People Live), he informs me that Missoura is a magical place, the most beau­tiful in the world, no state more glorious. His eyes are mischievous, his lashes are long. I can see what he looked like as a boy.

We share a taxi home, the streetlights making dizzy shadows and the car speeding as if we're being chased. It is one a.m. when we hit one of New York's unexplained deadlocks twelve blocks from my apartment, so we slide out of the taxi into the cold, into the great What Next? and Nick starts walking me home, his hand on the small of my back, our faces stunned by the chill. As we turn the corner, the local bakery is getting its powdered sugar delivered, funneled into the cellar by the barrelful as if it were cement, and we can see nothing but the shadows of the deliverymen in the white, sweet cloud. The street is billowing, and Nick pulls me close and smiles that smile again, and he takes a single lock of my hair between two fingers and runs them all the way to the end, tugging twice, like he's ringing a bell. His eye­lashes are trimmed with powder, and before he leans in, he brushes the sugar from my lips so he can taste me.

I swung wide the door of my bar, slipped into the darkness, and took my first real deep breath of the day, took in the smell of cigarettes and beer, the spice of a dribbled bourbon, the tang of old popcorn. There was only one customer in the bar, sitting by herself at the far, far end: an older woman named Sue who had come in every Thursday with her husband until he died three months back. Now she came alone every Thursday, never much for conversation, just sitting with a beer and a crossword, preserving a ritual.

My sister was at work behind the bar, her hair pulled back in nerdy-girl barrettes, her arms pink as she dipped the beer glasses in and out of hot suds. Go is slender and strange-faced, which is not to say unattractive. Her features just take a moment to make sense: the broad jaw; the pinched, pretty nose; the dark globe eyes. If this were a period movie, a man would tilt back his fedora, whistle at the sight of her, and say, "Now, there's a helluva broad !" The face of a '30s screwball-movie queen doesn't always translate in our pixie-princess times, but I know from our years together that men like my sister, a lot, which puts me in that strange brotherly realm of being both proud and wary.

"Do they still make pimento loaf?" she said by way of greeting, not looking up, just knowing it was me, and I felt the relief I usually felt when I saw her: Things might not be great, but things would be okay.

My twin, Go. I've said this phrase so many times, it has become a reassuring mantra instead of actual words: Mytwingo. We were born in the '70s, back when twins were rare, a bit magical: cousins of the unicorn, siblings of the elves. We even have a dash of twin telepathy. Go is truly the one person in the entire world I am totally myself with. I don't feel the need to explain my actions to her. I don't clarify, I don't doubt, I don't worry. I don't tell her everything, not anymore, but I tell her more than anyone else, by far. I tell her as much as I can. We spent nine months back to back, covering each other. It became a lifelong habit. It never mattered to me that she was a girl, strange for a deeply self-conscious kid. What can I say? She was always just cool.

"Pimento loaf, that's like lunch meat, right? I think they do."

"We should get some," she said. She arched an eyebrow at me. "I'm intrigued."

Without asking, she poured me a draft of PBR into a mug of ques­tionable cleanliness. When she caught me staring at the smudged rim, she brought the glass up to her mouth and licked the smudge away, leaving a smear of saliva. She set the mug squarely in front of me. "Better, my prince?"

Go firmly believes that I got the best of everything from our par­ents, that I was the boy they planned on, the single child they could afford, and that she sneaked into this world by clamping onto my ankle, an unwanted stranger. (For my dad, a particularly unwanted stranger.) She believes she was left to fend for herself throughout childhood, a pitiful creature of random hand-me-downs and for­gotten permission slips, tightened budgets and general regret. This vision could be somewhat true; I can barely stand to admit it.

"Yes, my squalid little serf," I said, and fluttered my hands in royal dispensation.

I huddled over my beer. I needed to sit and drink a beer or three. My nerves were still singing from the morning.

"What's up with you?" she asked. "You look all twitchy." She flicked some suds at me, more water than soap. The air-conditioning kicked on, ruffling the tops of our heads. We spent more time in The Bar than we needed to. It had become the childhood clubhouse we never had. We'd busted open the storage boxes in our mother's base­ment one drunken night last year, back when she was alive but right near the end, when we were in need of comfort, and we revisited the toys and games with much oohing and ahhing between sips of canned beer. Christmas in August. After Mom died, Go moved into our old house, and we slowly relocated our toys, piecemeal, to The Bar: a Strawberry Shortcake doll, now scentless, pops up on a stool one day (my gift to Go). A tiny Hot Wheels El Camino, one wheel missing, appears on a shelf in the corner (Go's to me).

We were thinking of introducing a board game night, even though most of our customers were too old to be nostalgic for our Hungry Hungry Hippos, our Game of Life with its tiny plastic cars to be filled with tiny plastic pinhead spouses and tiny plastic pinhead babies. I couldn't remember how you won. (Deep Hasbro thought for the day.)

Go refilled my beer, refilled her beer. Her left eyelid drooped slightly. It was exactly noon, 12-00, and I wondered how long she'd been drinking. She's had a bumpy decade. My speculative sister, she of the rocket-science brain and the rodeo spirit, dropped out of col­lege and moved to Manhattan in the late '90s. She was one of the original dot-com phenoms—made crazy money for two years, then took the Internet bubble bath in 2000. Go remained unflappable. She was closer to twenty than thirty; she was fine. For act two, she got her degree and joined the gray-suited world of investment banking. She was midlevel, nothing flashy, nothing blameful, but she lost her job—fast—with the 2008 financial meltdown. I didn't even know she'd left New York until she phoned me from Mom's house: I give up. I begged her, cajoled her to return, hearing nothing but peeved silence on the other end. After I hung up, I made an anxious pilgrim­age to her apartment in the Bowery and saw Gary, her beloved ficus tree, yellow-dead on the fire escape, and knew she'd never come back.

The Bar seemed to cheer her up. She handled the books, she poured the beers. She stole from the tip jar semi-regularly, but then she did more work than me. We never talked about our old lives. We were Dunnes, and we were done, and strangely content about it.

"So, what?" Go said, her usual way of beginning a conversation.

"Eh, what? Eh, bad? You look bad."

I shrugged a yes; she scanned my face.

"Amy?" she asked. It was an easy question. I shrugged again—a confirmation this time, a whatcha gonna do? shrug.

Go gave me her amused face, both elbows on the bar, hands cra­dling chin, hunkering down for an incisive dissection of my marriage. Go, an expert panel of one. "What about her?"

"Bad day. It's just a bad day."

"Don't let her worry you." Go lit a cigarette. She smoked exactly one a day. "Women are crazy." Go didn't consider herself part of the general category of women, a word she used derisively.

I blew Go's smoke back to its owner. "It's our anniversary today. Five years."

"Wow." My sister cocked her head back. She'd been a bridesmaid, all in violet—"the gorgeous, raven-haired, amethyst-draped dame, " Amy's mother had dubbed her—but anniversaries weren't something she'd remember. "Jeez. Fuck. Dude. That came fast." She blew more smoke toward me, a lazy game of cancer catch. "She going to do one of her, uh, what do you call it, not scavenger hunt—"

"Treasure hunt," I said.

My wife loved games, mostly mind games, but also actual games of amusement, and for our anniversary she always set up an elabo­rate treasure hunt, with each clue leading to the hiding place of the next clue until I reached the end, and my present. It was what her dad always did for her mom on their anniversary, and don't think I don't see the gender roles here, that I don't get the hint. But I did not grow up in Amy's household, I grew up in mine, and the last present I remember my dad giving my mom was an iron, set on the kitchen counter, no wrapping paper.

"Should we make a wager on how pissed she's going to get at you this year?" Go asked, smiling over the rim of her beer.

The problem with Amy's treasure hunts: I never figured out the clues. Our first anniversary, back in New York, I went two for seven. That was my best year. The opening parley:

This place is a bit of a hole in the wall, But we had a great kiss there one Tuesday last fall.

Ever been in a spelling bee as a kid? That snowy second after the announcement of the word as you sift your brain to see if you can spell it? It was like that, the blank panic.

"An Irish bar in a not-so-Irish place," Amy nudged.

I bit the side of my lip, started a shrug, scanning our living room as if the answer might appear. She gave me another very long minute.

"We were lost in the rain," she said in a voice that was pleading on the way to peeved.

I finished the shrug.

" McMann's, Nick. Remember, when we got lost in the rain in Chinatown trying to find that dim sum place, and it was supposed to be near the statue of Confucius but it turns out there are two statues of Confucius, and we ended up at that random Irish bar all soak­ing wet, and we slammed a few whiskeys, and you grabbed me and kissed me, and it was—"

"Right! You should have done a clue with Confucius, I would have gotten that."

"The statue wasn't the point. The place was the point. The moment. I just thought it was special." She said these last words in a childish lilt that I once found fetching.

"It was special." I pulled her to me and kissed her. "That smooch right there was my special anniversary reenactment. Let's go do it again at McMann's."

At McMann's, the bartender, a big, bearded bear-kid, saw us come in and grinned, poured us both whiskeys, and pushed over the next clue.

When I'm down and feeling blue There's only one place that will do.

That one turned out to be the Alice in Wonderland statue at Central Park, which Amy had told me—she'd told me, she knew she'd told me many times—lightened her moods as a child. I do not remember any of those conversations. I'm being honest here, I just don't. I have a dash of ADD, and I've always found my wife a bit daz­zling, in the purest sense of the word: to lose clear vision, especially from looking at bright light. It was enough to be near her and hear her talk, it didn't always matter what she was saying. It should have, but it didn't.

By the time we got to the end of the day, to exchanging our actual presents—the traditional paper presents for the first year of marriage—Amy was not speaking to me.

"I love you, Amy. You know I love you," I said, tailing her in and out of the family packs of dazed tourists parked in the middle of the sidewalk, oblivious and openmouthed. Amy was slipping through the Central Park crowds, maneuvering between laser-eyed joggers and scissor-legged skaters, kneeling parents and toddlers careering like drunks, always just ahead of me, tight-lipped, hurrying nowhere. Me trying to catch up, grab her arm. She stopped finally, gave me a face unmoved as I explained myself, one mental finger tamping down my exasperation: "Amy, I don't get why I need to prove my love to you by remembering the exact same things you do, the exact same way you do. It doesn't mean I don't love our life together."

A nearby clown blew up a balloon animal, a man bought a rose, a child licked an ice cream cone, and a genuine tradition was born, one I'd never forget: Amy always going overboard, me never, ever worthy of the effort. Happy anniversary, asshole.

"I'm guessing—five years—she's going to get really pissed," Go continued. "So I hope you got her a really good present."

"On the to-do list."

"What's the, like, symbol, for five years? Paper?"

"Paper is first year," I said. At the end of Year One's unexpectedly wrenching treasure hunt, Amy presented me with a set of posh statio­nery, my initials embossed at the top, the paper so creamy I expected my fingers to come away moist. In return, I'd presented my wife with a bright red dime-store paper kite, picturing the park, picnics, warm summer gusts. Neither of us liked our presents; we'd each have pre­ferred the other's. It was a reverse O. Henry.

"Silver?" guessed Go. "Bronze? Scrimshaw? Help me out."

"Wood," I said. "There's no romantic present for wood."

At the other end of the bar, Sue neatly folded her newspaper and left it on the bartop with her empty mug and a five-dollar bill. We all exchanged silent smiles as she walked out.

"I got it," Go said. "Go home, fuck her brains out, then smack her with your penis and scream, 'There's some wood for you, bitch!' "

We laughed. Then we both flushed pink in our cheeks in the same spot. It was the kind of raunchy, unsisterly joke that Go enjoyed toss­ing at me like a grenade. It was also the reason why, in high school, there were always rumors that we secretly screwed. Twincest. We were too tight: our inside jokes, our edge-of-the-party whispers. I'm pretty sure I don't need to say this, but you are not Go, you might misconstrue, so I will: My sister and I have never screwed or even thought of screwing. We just really like each other.

Go was now pantomiming dick-slapping my wife.

No, Amy and Go were never going to be friends. They were each too territorial. Go was used to being the alpha girl in my life, Amy was used to being the alpha girl in everyone's life. For two people who lived in the same city—the same city twice: first New York, now here—they barely knew each other. They flitted in and out of my life like well-timed stage actors, one going out the door as the other came in, and on the rare occasions when they both inhabited the same room, they seemed somewhat bemused at the situation.

Before Amy and I got serious, got engaged, got married, I would get glimpses of Go's thoughts in a sentence here or there. It's funny, I can't quite get a bead on her, like who she really is. And: You just seem kind of not yourself with her. And: There's a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her. And finally: The important thing is she makes you really happy.

Back when Amy made me really happy.

Amy offered her own notions of Go: She's very . . . Missouri, isn't she? And: You just have to be in the right mood for her. And: She's a little needy about you, but then I guess she doesn't have anyone else.

I'd hoped when we all wound up back in Missouri, the two would let it drop—agree to disagree, free to be you and me. Neither did. Go was funnier than Amy, though, so it was a mismatched battle. Amy was clever, withering, sarcastic. Amy could get me riled up, could make an excellent, barbed point, but Go always made me laugh. It is dangerous to laugh at your spouse.

"Go, I thought we agreed you'd never mention my genitalia again," I said. "That within the bounds of our sibling relationship, I have no genitalia."

The phone rang. Go took one more sip of her beer and answered, gave an eyeroll and a smile. "He sure is here, one moment, please!" To me, she mouthed: "Carl."

Carl Pelley lived across the street from me and Amy. Retired three years. Divorced two years. Moved into our development right after. He'd been a traveling salesman—children's party supplies—and I sensed that after four decades of motel living, he wasn't quite at home being home. He showed up at the bar nearly every day with a pun­gent Hardee's bag, complaining about his budget until he was offered a first drink on the house. (This was another thing I learned about Carl from his days in The Bar—that he was a functioning but serious alcoholic.) He had the good grace to accept whatever we were "trying to get rid of," and he meant it: For one full month Carl drank nothing but dusty Zimas, circa 1992, that we'd discovered in the basement. When a hangover kept Carl home, he'd find a reason to call: Your mailbox looks awfully full today, Nicky, maybe a package came. Or: It's supposed to rain, you might want to close your windows. The reasons were bogus. Carl just needed to hear the clink of glasses, the glug of a drink being poured.

I picked up the phone, shaking a tumbler of ice near the receiver so Carl could imagine his gin.

"Hey, Nicky," Carl's watery voice came over. "Sorry to bother you. I just thought you should know. . . your door is wide open, and that cat of yours is outside. It isn't supposed to be, right?"

I gave a noncommittal grunt.

"I'd go over and check, but I'm a little under the weather," Carl said heavily.

"Don't worry," I said. "It's time for me to go home anyway."

It was a fifteen-minute drive, straight north along River Road. Driving into our development occasionally makes me shiver, the sheer num­ber of gaping dark houses—homes that have never known inhabit­ants, or homes that have known owners and seen them ejected, the house standing triumphantly voided, humanless.

When Amy and I moved in, our only neighbors descended on us: one middle-aged single mom of three, bearing a casserole; a young father of triplets with a six-pack of beer (his wife left at home with the triplets); an older Christian couple who lived a few houses down; and of course, Carl from across the street. We sat out on our back deck and watched the river, and they all talked ruefully about ARMs, and zero percent interest, and zero money down, and then they all remarked how Amy and I were the only ones with river access, the only ones without children. "Just the two of you? In this whole big house?" the single mom asked, doling out a scrambled-egg some­thing.

"Just the two of us," I confirmed with a smile, and nodded in appreciation as I took a mouthful of wobbly egg.

"Seems lonely."

On that she was right.

Four months later, the whole big house lady lost her mortgage battle and disappeared in the night with her three kids. Her house has remained empty. The living-room window still has a child's picture of a butterfly taped to it, the bright Magic Marker sun-faded to brown. One evening not long ago, I drove past and saw a man, bearded, bedraggled, staring out from behind the picture, floating in the dark like some sad aquarium fish. He saw me see him and flickered back into the depths of the house. The next day I left a brown paper bag full of sandwiches on the front step; it sat in the sun untouched for a week, decaying wetly, until I picked it back up and threw it out.

Quiet. The complex was always disturbingly quiet. As I neared our home, conscious of the noise of the car engine, I could see the cat was definitely on the steps. Still on the steps, twenty minutes after Carl's call. This was strange. Amy loved the cat, the cat was declawed, the cat was never let outside, never ever, because the cat, Bleecker, was sweet but extremely stupid, and despite the LoJack tracking device pelleted somewhere in his fat furry rolls, Amy knew she'd never see the cat again if he ever got out. The cat would waddle straight into the Mississippi River—deedle-de-dum—and float all the way to the Gulf of Mexico into the maw of a hungry bull shark.

But it turned out the cat wasn't even smart enough to get past the steps. Bleecker was perched on the edge of the porch, a pudgy but proud sentinel—Private Tryhard. As I pulled in to the drive, Carl came out and stood on his own front steps, and I could feel the cat and the old man both watching me as I got out of the car and walked toward the house, the red peonies along the border looking fat and juicy, asking to be devoured.

I was about to go into blocking position to get the cat when I saw that the front door was open. Carl had said as much, but seeing it was different. This wasn't taking-out-the-trash-back-in-a-minute open. This was wide-gaping-ominous open.

Carl hovered across the way, waiting for my response, and like some awful piece of performance art, I felt myself enacting Con­cerned Husband. I stood on the middle step and frowned, then took the stairs quickly, two at a time, calling out my wife's name.

"Amy, you home?"

I ran straight upstairs. No Amy. The ironing board was set up, the iron still on, a dress waiting to be pressed.

As I ran back downstairs, I could see Carl still framed in the open doorway, hands on hips, watching. I swerved into the living room, and pulled up short. The carpet glinted with shards of glass, the coffee table shattered. End tables were on their sides, books slid across the floor like a card trick. Even the heavy antique ottoman was belly-up, its four tiny feet in the air like something dead. In the middle of the mess was a pair of good sharp scissors.

I began running, bellowing her name. Through the kitchen, where a teakettle was burning, down to the basement, where the guest room stood empty, and then out the back door. I pounded across our yard onto the slender boat deck leading out over the river. I peeked over the side to see if she was in our rowboat, where I had found her one day, tethered to the dock, rocking in the water, her face to the sun, eyes closed, and as I'd peered down into the dazzling reflections of the river, at her beautiful, still face, she'd suddenly opened her blue eyes and said nothing to me, and I'd said nothing back and gone into the house alone.

She wasn't on the water, she wasn't in the house. Amy was not there.

Amy was gone.

Reprinted by permission of Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Copyright (c) 2012 by Gillian Flynn. Audio courtesy Random House Audio.

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Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Title: Gone Girl

Author:  Gillian Flynn

Publisher: Crown Publishing Group

Genre: Mystery Thriller, Psychological thriller

First Publication: 2012

Language:  English

Major Characters: Nick Dunne, Amy Elliot Dunne, Margo “Go” Dunne, Rand Elliot, Marybeth Elliot, Jim Gilpin, Rhonda Boney, Tanner Bolt, Andie Hardy, Desi Collings

Setting Place: North Carthage, Missouri

Theme:  Secrets and Lies in Marriage, Misogyny, Writing, Storytelling, and Narrative

Narrator: First person, alternating between Nick and Amy’s points of view from chapter to chapter.

Book Summary: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn centers its story about Nick and Amy Dunne’s strained marriage relationship. Nick used to work as a journalist, but loses his job. With his broke financial status, Nick decides to relocate from New York City to his smaller home town, North Carthage.

In an attempt of recovering from his financial deprivations, Nick opens a bar using the money from his wife. Nick runs the bar along with his twin sister Margo, providing a decent living for his family. But, as they days go by, his marriage with Amy is falling apart slowly. Amy resents her new life.

“There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.”

On a summer morning in Missouri, when Nick and Amy are celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary along with their relatives and acquaintances, Amy goes missing.

Police’s eyes turn towards Nick as an act of suspicion, since Nick used Amy’s money for his business and their relationship is strained. As the police delve into the investigation, different shades of stories come out from Nick’s and Amy’s sides. The suspense of the book is carried until the actual information is demystified.

The book, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, is also available on Audible. It’s narrated by Christiane Paul, Matthias Koeberlin.

Book Review: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

I’ve read Gillian Flynn’s previous two novels Sharp Objects  and  Dark Places and I liked them both! I thought she is an ingenious writer, and there is no doubt about it. She is one of the most genius authors I have read in recent times. Her books are exemplary and make deep impact on your mind! She has ability to surprise you in the most unexpected ways. Her stories have everything I look for in a good mystery book. Twists, characters that jump out of the pages and a clever plot.

Gillian Flynn is an ingenious, spectacular author. Reading her books feels like falling down into a dark rabbit hole. Her stories are full of mystery, twists, lies, secrets, revelations and have all the nasty characters. When I started reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, I was surprised by how different it was compared to her previous works. Flynn creates very dark and violent stories with very, very disturbed characters. But in this book the dark macabre tendency that dominates her writing contrasts with the beautiful New York skyline that the story is set against to.

“There’s a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.”

In her previous books we met dark characters with many flaws and nasty places that you would not like to find yourself too. But in this book the places were beautiful, the characters were popular, rich, gorgeous. Almost perfect. I really wondered if this was actually the same author that wrote those dark stories in the past. Well, this is what I thought for the first part of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.

The first part of the book is divided into two stories. The first story is one of those stories that you see in cheesy romantic movies. A beautiful love story, set in New York with gorgeous characters that kiss under clouds of sugar. Or so it seems. Because the characters hide their darker side. The second story is a mystery story of a man that lost his wife and he is accused of her murder. But then right in the middle of the book a wicked twist changes everything. The story transforms to Flynn’s regular stories that are dark, full of twists and gory.

“Love makes you want to be a better man—right, right. But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are.”

Gillian Flynn takes the common marital concerns about money, in-laws, and parenthood, and turns them into toxic waste in the case of Nick and Amy Dunne. Amy is revealed through her diaries, and Nick narrates his experiences as he follows the clues in the anniversary treasure hunt laid out by his wife before she disappeared.

From the first page I was hooked to the story. The mystery had me guessing and the love story made me to want to find out more. But it is the second part that made me not to able to stop reading! This book is full of twists. Twists that hit you like asteroids and keep you on the edge of your seat the whole time. The twists and turns are so many and so unexpected that you just cannot predict what will happen next!

But where Gillian Flynn does the best work is in the characters. Characters are amazingly developed here. This is the main aspect that makes her story so good. Her ability to create multidimensional characters is exceptional. A good psychological mystery really lies upon characters and Flynn’s characters in this book can really carry a story that surprises you constantly. The story is unfolded between two point of view. This choice of narration is what makes the book so great. Seeing the story through the eyes of two characters keeps you guessing till the end!

“It’s humbling, to become the very thing you once mocked.”

Every single detail is important and it turns the reader towards another direction. The ending of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn was so unexpected. There are people who love it and those who hate it. Two pages before the book ends, Flynn throws a huge twist that you either hate or love. Personally I loved it. I don’t think that there could be a more fitting end to this mystery thriller. It is one of those books that you finish and you can’t stop thinking about.

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by Gillian Flynn

Edgar Award for Best Novel, 2013

Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780753827666

Price: £9.99

ON SALE: 3rd January 2013

Genre : Fiction & Related Items / Crime & Mystery

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Gone Girl is a compelling read.

I expected a fairly mundane book on domestic drama involving cheating, deceit, lies and exaggerated drama. It definitely had all that but also much more. First things first, the story was good. However, Flynn's structure of telling the current story from Nick's perspective and simultaneously adding Amy's perspective through diary flashbacks elevate it to very good. The latter half of the book has 2 points where the plot takes a sudden turn and it remains engrossing till the very end.

Next, the prose and writing style was just what the book needed. It was direct and simple with a touch of edginess through certain vocabulary and references. You get as close you can to the characters as possible. Flynn covers all their feelings and thoughts precisely. The book could have been better edited as Nick's chapters could go for long sometimes, dwelling too much on his thoughts.

Finally, the characters. This is where I have heard criticism on the book. That none of the characters are likable enough. My question is, do they need to be? Further, are the characters all unlikable? Flynn writes her supporting characters well enough to not be cliches. The close sibling who does have her moments of doubt, the genius lawyer who doesn't always have the solution, the tough detective who is more than fair to her prime suspect and the loving parents who love the idea/image of their child as much as the child herself. These characters all feel real and 3 dimensional.

But the story is about Nick and Amy and yes, they aren't exactly role models. Should main characters all be likable for a story to be good? If yes then movies like Joker or shows like Breaking Bad shouldn't work at all. I think a boring, predictable character is worse than a character who is not a good person. Amy is a very interesting character who you just want to know more about. It's hard not to feel for Nick at a certain stage because he doesn't deserve what goes on with him. The punishment is more than what he deserved and that alone makes you sympathetic towards him. So, the characters too were nicely written. They stay with you for a while.

A special mention to the cool girl monologue which is the most talked about passage from the book. I cannot say how true it is but it does open up your mind and makes you reflect. You use an idea from the book and start pondering about it in real life. To me that makes a book worthwhile.

Gone Girl rating: 4/5.