Libby Day was just seven years old when her older brother massacred her family while she hid in a cupboard. Her evidence helped put him away. Ever since then she has been drifting, surviving for over twenty years on the proceeds of the 'Libby Day fund'. But now the money is running out and Libby is desperate. When she is offered $500 to do a guest appearance, she feels she has to accept. But this is no ordinary gathering. The Kill Club is a group of true-crime obsessives who share information on notorious murders, and they think her brother Ben is innocent. It is 2 January 1985 - the day of the murders. Ben is a social misfit, ground down by the small-town farming community in which he lives. His family is extremely poor, and his father Runner is violent, gambles and disappears for months on end. But Ben does have a girlfriend - a brooding heavy metal fan called Diondra. Through her, Ben becomes involved with drugs and the dark arts. When the town suddenly turns against him, his thoughts turn black. But is he capable of murder?In a brilliantly interwoven plot, Gillian Flynn keeps the reader balanced on a knife-edge, as Libby delves into her family's past and Ben spirals towards destruction.
It’s been a long time since the first two lines of a novel have grabbed me like these did:
I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it.
Libby is not an easy character to like. I don’t think she’s as mean as she portends to be, but at age 32 she’s completely incapable of taking care of herself, expecting to live forever on the kindness of strangers, either through their charity or her thievery. On the other hand, the majority of her family was killed horrifically when she was 7, and how should a person recover from that? I have to admit I warmed up to her a little as she tripped along, trying to piece together what happened that night. The back of the novel tries to sell you on the suspense of "Libby on the run from a killer", but that part happens so quickly that it’s not where the suspense lies. The suspense in this novel is in the shifting narrative between Libby’s brother, Ben, and her mother, Patty. As the story unfolds, I think it ends up being not only about the actual events, but about how little you can know about such a tragedy. I never could have guessed how things actually happened.
