Dark Places


Title: Dark Places
Author: Gillian Flynn
Publisher: Crown Publishers New York , 2013
543 pages


I was not a lovable child and I'd grown up into a deeply unlovable adult. Draw a picture of my soul and it'd be a scribble with fangs.

-Gillian Flynn,  Dark Places 

I just feel that Gillian Flynn's works must be read with a strong heart otherwise it will be haunting you and give you nightmares for days. Exaggerating? Perhaps I am but that's what happened to me after finishing Gone Girl and Sharp Objects. Therefore this Dark Places book had been in my bookcase for months and I still thought that I was not strong enough to drown into Flynn's dark ideas, not yet.

Until one day I saw Dark Places movie poster at movie theater and I guessed it's just time to read the book before I am tempted to watch the movie first. Then here it goes the story of Libby Day, the narrator and protagonist in the book. She was just seven years old when her two sisters and mother were brutally murdered in their rural Kansas farmhouse. The murders appear to be a satanic cult ritual. Libby escapes through a window and later testifies in court against her teenage brother.

Almost 25 years later, she agrees to revisit the crime and uncovers the truth that led up to that tragic night.

And this book even causing a worse impact on me. As a mother it breaks my heart thinking about Libby's days before and after the murders. She and her siblings never get any affection nor attention from the mother who frequently get abused by their father. The author delivers a vivid description on class issues in rural America, intense poverty, domestic abuse and satanic cult hysteria that swept away the US in the 1980s.

Dark Places the movie has been released on August 7, 2015. One of the casts is Charlize Theron. I am not sure whether I am brave enough to watch it.

Check the movie trailer here.

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