The Genius of Gone Girl

Maybe genius is over the top for those of you who are much closer to being a genius than I am, so I’ll settle for saying it’s brilliant instead.  There is really no safe way to review this book without giving something away.  It’s one of those stories you have to read for yourself for the pure joy of finding out where it leads you.

It lead me in six different directions at once.  What’s true?  What’s pure fabrication and imagination and delusion?  A wife goes missing on the day of a couple’s fifth wedding anniversary, and the husband becomes the main suspect in her disappearance.  There are as many clues as there are bizarre things I didn’t see coming.  Gotta love a book with all kinds of twists and turns.  In other, better words….

I cannot say this urgently enough: you have to read Gone Girl. It’s as if Gillian Flynn has mixed us a martini using battery acid instead of vermouth and somehow managed to make it taste really, really good. Gone Girl is delicious and intoxicating and delightfully poisonous. It’s smart (brilliant, actually). It’s funny (in the darkest possible way). The writing is jarringly good, and the story is, well…amazing.  Read the book and you’ll discover—among many other treasures—just how much freight (and fright) that last adjective can bear. (Scott Smith, New York Times bestselling author of The Ruins and A Simple Plan)

So, yes!  Do read this brilliant book.  You can’t say now that nobody ever told you how brilliant it is.