Dark Places (novel by Gillian Flynn, 2009)

 

Dark Places 

(novel by Gillian Flynn, 2009)

 

 

This is a seriously good, but also seriously flawed, Crime novel. It triumphs in its Characterization, but poorly resolves its Plot. Forgive the Plot. The people in it are so rich and real, it more than makes up for that.

It opens in 2009, but about two-thirds take place on a single day in 1985. Across that earlier date, the accumulating crisis within the Day family come to a head and for the POV Characters there seems no way out (“It was surprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were okay, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that simply wasn’t so.”). We, the readers, know this better than the Characters themselves, because we already know how many will be dead before the next sun rises.

 

It has three POV Characters: Thirty-one-year-old Libby Day, who speaks in first-person in the 2009 chapters, and Libby’s mother Patti and brother Ben, who alternately provide the POVs for the 1985 chapters which are told in close-third-person.

 

Patti had four children. On January 3, 1985, Patti and two of her children were murdered and her son Ben was charged and convicted of the crime. The significance of the specific date is the Real-World nightmare of the McMartin Preschool Scandal that unfolded in Los Angelas, California, and which the book mentions. The McMartin case was quite literally modern-day Witch-Hunt where seven people were sucked into accusations of committing 321 counts of Child Sexual Abuse in service of a Satanic Cult. It proved the longest and most expensive series of criminal trials in USA history, but resulted in no convictions, only a lot of shattered lives, because it was shown that the Cult didn’t exist, and the Abuse almost certainly never took place.

 

The McMartin saga dragged from 1984 to 1990, so the novel’s Murders unfolded during it, and the hysteria that created that Real-World Witch-Hunt, and that in-turn it fed back into it, led to many more dubious Criminal Cases and sometimes Criminal Convictions, before this National lunacy petered out. That background, and the concurrent Farm Crisis, are vividly evoked, and intertwined into a noose around the Characters’ necks.

 

Fifteen-years-old Ben was accused of being a Satanist and Murdering his family as part of some Ritual. There was no physical evidence to support the charges, but he was a sullen, disliked, loner, and he behaved guiltily and didn’t offer a defense. In addition to the McMartin case, the plot was likely influenced by the 1993 Child Murders in Robin Hood Hills, Arkansas, blamed on the now-famous West Memphis Three. In retrospect, the two most striking things about the Robin Hood Hills case is that the three teens convicted were innocent but seemed go out of their way to make themselves look guilty.

 

Ben’s conviction rested largely on the testimony of then-seven-year-old Libby. She’d escaped death by crawling out a window into the winter chill, costing her both fingers and toes. Her Courtroom Testimony was Confused was heavily coached, and decades later she is uncertain of the actual events, but knows at least some of what she said on the stand was less-than completely true.

 

Ever since then Libby’s been alone and bitter, “I assumed everything bad in the world could happen, because everything bad in the world already did happen.” Libby has remained silent about her childhood guilt and never much-matured as a person, instead she drifted through life distrustful of everyone. She’s jobless, alcoholic, ambitionless, a kleptomaniac and a parasite, and of herself she says, “I have meanness inside me, real as an organ … Draw a picture of my soul, it’d be a scribble with fangs.”

 

When Libby completely runs out of cash, she’s approached by a group of Amateur Detectives who call themselves the “Kill Club,” a vicious parody of people like the Activists that eventually secured the release of the boys-now-men, the West Memphis Three, in 2011 (that was after the book was published, but even in 2009 the case against the teens was collapsing very publicly). The Kill Club, led by over-eager and painfully awkward Lyle Wirth, are willing to pay her to be interviewed, provide memorabilia, and do some leg-work, because some witnesses they need to talk to won’t speak to True-Crime Fetishists, but might speak to Libby.

 

Very early in the book, all the Characters except desperate Patti, looked at with a cold eye, but that quickly softens. This increasing softness is representative of Libby’s Character arc. By the midpoint int the novel, almost everyone looks better when seen through her eyes than when described from any other perspective. This is a tale of wounded people, and most of those wounds were not self-inflicted, and even when they are, well, as novelist Willa Cather wrote, “Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.”

 

 

1985’s Ben is a sullen teen, broiling with rages that he doesn’t know who to direct at. He’s picked on at school and powerless before his own adolescent, sexual, urges which make him vulnerable to manipulations. He’s both submissive and viciously misogynistic, in his head using crass and pornographic language towards himself and the girls he likes. (Patti’s sections feature no profanity, Libby’s very little.) He’s smitten with a girl, not he's girlfriend, named Krissi Cates, but the initial descriptions of her comes off as if she were a predatory slut, which is contradicted by the story’s contents, where she’s only eleven-years-old, therefore blameless, and their not-quite-relationship would be sweet in any other context.

 

Almost half-way through the book, when Libby meets Ben in Prison, he’s now a man, with no hope of ever being released, but he’s also mature, even kindly, and longing for nothing except some connection to the last remaining member of his family. Later, when Libby meets adult Krissi, she’s no longer blameless, she’s a stripper and truck-stop prostitute, shares with Libby alcoholism and kleptomania; but the “shares” part is important, because Libby understands her: “She talked to me because we had the same chemicals in our blood: shame, anger, greed. Unjustified nostalgia.” Those scenes shine a kinder light on the broken Krissi than the earlier ones, when she was young, un-wounded, and has yet to do anyone a deliberate wrong.

 

Libby’s dubious quest, which she original engages in only because she’s broke, forces her to be less self-isolating, and her surprise capacity to view so many others in a better light than most others would starts allowing her to view herself in a better light than others see her. Probing her own dark places is her path to the light – or at least it will be if she manages to survive the trip.

 

The most irredeemable character is Runner Day, Libby’s father. In 1985 he was an alcoholic and parasitic, selling drugs to school kids and running Bookies he welched on. He’s worse in 2009, now homeless and living in a toxic waste dump. In 1985, he’s the root of most of Patti’s crisis; in 2009, when Libby’s confrontation with him is akin to Dante touring Hell. Libby talks much about the “Day blood” being bad.

 

The Satanism angle emergers through two other dislikable characters, Ben’s friends in 1985 who were both abusive of him: His actual girlfriend Diondra Wertzner who has been all-but abandoned by her wealthy parents and is now belittling towards everyone and everything. Trey Teepano, a teen Drug Dealer and Bookie who is obviously keeping Diondra as side-action and not as easily played as Ben, sits back and observers the pathetic relationship, demeaning Ben at even turn. Their resentments at the whole world led them to flirt with Satanism, leading Ben to flirt with it as well, and building the circumstances that become Ben’s trap.

 

The details are laid out expertly, and every detail counts. The wounded wound others, and there’s a sense that powerlessness before fate makes virtue impossible, the difference between good and evil isn’t the difference between those who standing up or falling, because we’re all forever falling, there’s only the difference of how far one is willing to sink.

 

Patti’s inability to take control any family or financial crisis is the platform of Ben’s rage, though he doesn’t understand that. Early on it looks as if Patti will turn to prostitution to mitigate her problems, but that prove not to be the case. In the end, we wish for every lost soul in this book that it had been the path she was choosing.

 

As this is a fiction, Ben is almost required to be innocent, but during their 2009 jail encounter, Libby can tell he’s lying about something inconsequential. Already locked up for two decades with no hope of getting out, why would he lie? Unless the lie isn’t inconsequential, unless the lie hides everything.

 

A challenge that Crime fiction often faces when it has ambitions to excel over the merely serviceable is that it has two demands pulling in opposite directions. Some Authors are gifted at developing deeply-realized Characters, others are experts building beautiful Puzzles. Gillain Flynn clearly triumphs in the former and this gives her tale of the lunacies of the USA in the 1980s real resonance.

 

Problematically for this of wounded souls longing for Redemption, is that there’s also a Mystery that needs to be solved. About halfway through this book it became obvious to me that Flynn had painted herself into a trap just like she had her Characters, that there was no believable solution to the Mystery that offered the Characters sought-after Redemption. When I reached the climax, I was proved right. It was driven by impossible coincidences and dissatisfies.

 

But the novel didn’t end there, and improbably redeemed itself in an unusually long denouement which stretches across several chapters. These not obviously likable Characters are all presented with depth and compassion, and a few are finally offered a little spiritual peace that proved surprisingly well-earned.

 

Wrote Kirkus Reviews, “For most of the wild story’s running time, however, every sentence crackles with enough baleful energy to fuel a whole town.”

 

The novel was short-listed for the Steel-Dagger award from the Crime Writers Association, won a Black Quill for Dark Genre Novel of the Year from Dark Scribe Magazine, was a New York Times Hardcover Best Seller for two consecutive weeks, and adapted to a film of the same name (2015) that features exceptionally good performances but was killed by the flaws in the Plot that the book managed to rise above.