Dark Places

Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were killed on the family farm in Kansas. She escaped, and her testimony sent her fifteen-year-old brother Ben to prison for life.

Twenty-five years later the donations that supported her have run out. A club of amateurs convinced Ben is innocent offers to pay her for access to people connected to the case.

Her testimony convicted her brother, and she has run out of money, and people will pay her to reopen it.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

She is a thief, a liar, incapable of sustained employment, and entirely aware of how unpleasant she is.

Flynn refuses to make her sympathetic in the conventional way, and the character's refusal to be improved by the plot is the novel's most distinctive quality. Flynn also gives her a specific physical presence — small, red-haired, missing fingers — which keeps the damage concrete rather than psychological.

The present-day investigation alternates with a single day in January 1985, told in rotation from the mother's and Ben's perspectives, leading to the killings.

The historical thread is the stronger of the two and supplies the reader with information Libby spends the novel failing to obtain.

The Day farm is failing, the mother is working three jobs, and the specific texture of agricultural debt in 1980s Kansas is rendered with real attention.

Flynn is exceptionally good on this, and the mother's chapters — a woman doing arithmetic she already knows will not work — are the best writing in the book.

The 1985 sections take place during the moral panic about ritual abuse, and the accusations against Ben are shaped by it.

The historical material is accurate and the novel is precise about how adult anxiety converted a teenager's interest in heavy metal into evidence. Flynn also shows the interviewers who produced the evidence, and the sequences in which a child is questioned into a story are the book's most chilling.

The amateur enthusiasts who fund Libby's investigation are drawn with a mixture of contempt and sympathy, and the novel is interested in the appetite for true crime as entertainment.

It anticipates a great deal about the subsequent podcast and documentary economy, and Flynn is more ambivalent than dismissive.

Libby's testimony was coached, her memories were formed under pressure, and the novel is careful about the mechanics of how a child's account is constructed by adults.

The material on suggestibility is handled well and is central rather than incidental. Libby's own attempts to distinguish what she remembers from what she was told are the novel's best sustained thread, and they are never fully resolved.

First person for Libby, close third for the historical chapters, with a distinctive voice that is sour, funny and physically specific.

Flynn writes unpleasantness better than almost anyone working, and the sentences are consistently sharper than the category requires. The chapter openings in particular are exceptional, and Flynn establishes a scene in two sentences more reliably than almost anyone in the category.

It preceded her best-known novel and shares its interest in women who are permitted to be genuinely unlikeable.

It is less structurally clever and, for a number of readers, the better book, largely because the social material has more substance. It also sold modestly on publication and found its audience afterwards, which is worth knowing given how completely the later novel overshadowed it.

The answer to what happened is elaborate, involves several parties, and depends on a coincidence the novel works reasonably hard to justify.

It is the weakest element. The investigation is more interesting than its conclusion, which is a common problem when a mystery has been sustained this long.

The killings are described directly in the final sections, and the novel includes animal cruelty and the abuse of children.

The material is not gratuitous and is genuinely distressing, and readers should expect it rather than be surprised. The 1985 chapters in particular build toward something the reader knows is coming, which makes them considerably harder to read than the present-day material.

Readers who want crime fiction with a strong social argument and a narrator who refuses to be likeable.

It is bleaker than Gone Girl and less famous, and readers who admired that book's nastiness will find this one has more to say about why people end up where they do.