Dark Places

Dark Places is the second novel by American author Gillian Flynn, following her debut Sharp Objects. Published in 2009, it was named a Publishers Weekly book of the year and recommended as a New Yorker critics' pick and a Chicago Tribune best book. The story begins with the mass murder known as the "Satanic Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas." On a winter night in 1985, seven-year-old Libby Day hides in a closet and watches her mother and two sisters be killed; she escapes the farmhouse and, as the sole survivor, testifies in court that her fifteen-year-old brother Ben is the murderer, sending him to prison. Twenty-five years later, Libby lives off public sympathy and donations, cold and hardened, trapped in the shadow of the massacre. When the money is nearly gone, a "Kill Club" obsessed with old cases approaches Libby and offers to pay her to revisit the people involved in the case and prove Ben's innocence. She agrees for the money and begins returning again and again to the scene, confronting the differing memories of her mother, brother, father, and the witnesses of that time. The novel alternates between adult Libby's present and flashbacks to the day of the crime in 1985, gradually tearing open overlooked details and asking how reliable traumatic memory really is and how a child's testimony rewrote her family's fate. Flynn writes with a cold, sharp edge about family hardship, media spectacle, and small-town prejudice, breaking "truth" down into each person's own version of events and leaving, beyond the suspense, an aftertaste of family love, guilt, and redemption.