Rare Book Review: Gone Girl

Yes, I was supposed to write my next post about Mama, but I just don't feel like it.  Although I liked Mama (and annoyed my husband for a week walking around saying "MAMA") I just don't feel impassioned to write about it.  It's good, not great.  I love Jessica Chastain: she was awesome in Zero Dark Thirty and should have won the Oscar (no disrespect to Jennifer Lawrence, her performance was amazing and I have a serious girl crush on her after the Oscars, but COME ON!!  Chastain killed it in Zero Dark Thirty!).  I write this blog for fun, and I am getting cranky and old: If I don't love it or hate it I don't want to write about it. 

What I love, right now (besides Girls, I am obsessed), is Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.  Gone Girl isn't a horror novel, its a thriller.  But it does have some horror elements in it: a total psychopath, a murder, some gore.  The best I can describe it is that if Hitchcock were around today he would TOTALLY make this movie.  It would be more in the Psycho/Vertigo vein rather than something like Rear Window.  I realize Psycho and Vertigo are very different films, but trust: read this book and you understand what I am getting at. 

Darkly funny, Gone Girl tells the story of Nick and Amy Dunne, a married couple who have fallen on hard times.  Nick lost his job as a journalist, and Amy lost hers writing quizzes for a Cosmo type magazine.  Amy is the daughter of famous writers, who used her as inspiration for a series of YA books ala Judy Blume.  Nick and Amy have been married 5 years, and after losing their incomes they decide to move to Missouri to take care of Nick's ailing Mom.  Their marriage goes from bad to worse in the middle of nowhere, and one day Nick comes home and finds that Amy is gone, and gone in a bad way.  As police investigate we get two narratives from our lead characters:  Nick, under suspicion for murder, and the possibly dead Amy. With each chapter author Gillian Flynn reveals a bit more of the truth.  But, if you think you know where the story is going, you are dead wrong.

This book was so good I couldn't put it down.  If you like a little mystery with your macabre, I highly recommend Gone Girl.