Gillian Flynn writes uniquely thrilling crime novels

As Gillian Flynn, the bestselling author of the acclaimed novel and film adaptation Gone Girl, continues to reach success, the common theme of chilling, violent mysteries weaves through her entire career. Warning: this article contains novel and film spoilers.

Flynn was born in Kansas City, Mo. to a family who supported and nourished her love for literature and film. She published her first novel, Sharp Objects, in 2006.

The story follows Camille Preaker, a crime reporter who is sent to write about the murders of two preteen girls in her very own hometown. But Camille faces troubles of her own as she has just recently come out of a psych hospital due to cutting herself.

She carves words into her flesh and has been doing so since her adolescence. So now, when Camille returns to an overbearing mother and a half-sister she barely knows, she has to find a murderer while trying to maintain her own sanity.

In 2009, Flynn published her second novel, Dark Places, the harrowing tale of the murders of the Day family. Now in her thirties, Libby Day, the only survivor of the murders, is convinced that her brother Ben was the killer.

Libby gets wrapped up in the Killing Club, where conspiracy theorists obsessed with clearing Ben’s name pay her to track down people from her town and to try to solve the crime. The novel is told in alternating chronologies; from Libby’s modern-day, first-person adventures to the third-person narratives of what the Day family was doing during the 24 hours leading up to the murders.

Then, in 2012, Flynn published her most successful book to date, Gone Girl. In Gone Girl, Nick Dunne’s wife Amy goes missing, and he is blamed for the disappearance.

The story is told in chapters alternating between Nick’s perspective and Amy’s journal entries. The book is separated into three acts, and in each, there are dramatic twists and turns. Flynn illuminates the differences in how Nick and Amy view their marriage and plays on a reader’s natural trust of the narrator to thread together a complex mystery.

Flynn is certainly no stranger to Hollywood. Gone Girl was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film, and Flynn has also sold the movie rights to Dark Places, for which Charlize Theron was in talks to produce and star in. Sharp Objects is in the works to become a serialized television show.

Flynn is a truly masterful writer. She paints pictures of gruesome crime scenes and conveys a complex understanding of the human mind. All of her books are dark and violent and are all psychological thrillers as much as they are crime mysteries.

Flynn plays with human instinct; she feeds upon her readers’ innate desire to watch, to hear about and to read about violence. People like crime — the more brutal the better — so long as they don’t have to experience it themselves. And she likes to surprise her readers — the bigger the twist is at the end, the better.

What Flynn does so well and what sets her apart from other mystery genre writers is how she uses the elements of the narrative as her tools. Specifically, the sharpest tool that she implements is perspective. This is most obvious in Gone Girl, where the novel’s points of view help shape the plot.

Amy’s journal can’t be trusted, and even Nick’s real time perspective is unreliable. He keeps his girlfriend a secret from both the police and the readers for much longer than a man should if he is, in fact, worried about his wife’s disappearance. Nick and Amy are both liars, but a reader wants to trust them because they are the narrators.

In Dark Places, Flynn slowly paints the picture of what truly happened when the Day family was murdered, and as she does so, readers slowly realize that their narrator, Libby, doesn’t even trust her own perspective. Libby, who was only seven when her family was killed, misinterprets many of the events that occurred, so anything she asserts as the truth can’t really be trusted.

And in Sharp Objects, Flynn’s characters take advantage of one another’s preconceived perceptions of how they should behave. Camille accuses her own mother of committing the crimes because that is the woman she has known to expect.

However, Camille realizes too late that it was her half-sister, Amma, who killed the girls from the small town. Amma played on her sister’s long-developed distrust of their mother as well as the town’s perception of her as an innocent little girl, when in truth, Amma is the most twisted character in an unbelievable, twisted world.

Gillian Flynn molds her stories like clay, hiding clues in the psyches of flawed characters. Camille Preaker returns to an unsafe home emotionally unstable. Libby Day emerged from a childhood trauma greedy, selfish, and stubborn. Nick Dunne is a lying shell of a man, while Amy Dunne is a scheming, clever woman who resents anyone who has ever loved her.

Reading one of Flynn’s books can be an experience akin to staying submerged in water for a long period of time. Her stories are dark and violent and emotionally draining. Closing the book is like taking that first breath of air after coming up from a dive, but her writing is compelling enough that breathing is suddenly less important than turning the page.