Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl When I had heard that New York Times’ Crime Columnist, Marilyn Stasio, had written about former Entertainment Weekly critic, Gillian Flynn’s newest thriller, the best-selling crime novel of the summer, Gone Girl, I was compelled to see what she had written. Stasio begins by setting Flynn’s newest piece on a pedestal of literary genius. Her use of the English language made it as tempting as bait to a fish: “Gillian Flynn’s latest novel of psychological suspense will confound anyone trying to keep up with her quicksilver mind and diabolical rules of play.” She goes on later in the article to comment of her fearless ability to strip dense pretenses from her characters and lay them bare across the pages of the novel for all her readers to see. I was sold at “psychological.” The article commends the author on her clever usage of a double narration technique. This, ties in with Flynn’s supposed unique ability which allows us, the readers, to closely view the elaborate maze of a book that she has created. If you don’t pay attention to where everything is headed, you’ll be lost before you can flip the page. The specific uses of the two narrators (who are also the main characters) are one of the only things that I agree upon with Stasio. One of the narrators gives us his confused perspective of the main plot which only leads us to a red herring. We are fed a selective amount and quality of information that creates a neon sign in our head that says, “HE KILLED HER.” The other narrator, just as useful, gives us disturbing accounts of events that, as Stasio says, are “instances of marital discord [that] might flare into a homicidal rage.” If nothing else reeled me in, the words “homicidal” and “rage” definitely led me to believe the story would inevitably lead to a climactic ending that mirrored something that could only be found in a Saw movie. I was left as a man is left disappointed at an altar. I felt as if I had wasted a good portion of my