There are books that you read that haunt you and Sharp Objects, the smart, frightening, sad, sexy, and incredibly compelling debut novel by Gillian Flynn is one that I'll remember forever. Part mystery, part essay in severe family dysfunction, Flynn gives us a heroine for a whole new era: "cub" reporter Camille Preaker, writer for a third-rate Chicago newspaper, given the assignment to return to her Missouri hometown to investigate the murder of two young girls. Both girls were killed, but not sexually molested, although both bodies had the majority of their teeth pulled. That's the creepy start. Don't worry, it gets worse.
Preaker is a cutter, a woman who has mutilated her own body by carving words into it. Smothered by a mother who can't love, she watched her baby sister die through a progression of imagined illnesses. The rift between Camille and her mother is gigantic, but mom Adora owns the town's main business, a hog slaughtering factory, and as such, is intimately involved in the affairs of everyone in the small community. Camille's half-sister, Amma, is the current daughter smothered by the over-protective Adora. And Camille heads headlong into this viper's nest of instability, right back to the kinfolk who made her what she is today, a literal walking dictionary of all of her flaws.
If it all sounds too, too gothic, and maybe even too Stephen King-ish, it isn't. It's Mean Girls meets Wild Things with a healthy dose of Twin Peaks thrown in. And it's incredibly well-written. For all the creepiness Flynn--who is the chief TV reviewer for my favorite magazine, Entertainment Weekly--injects in this sordid tale, there's just as much humanity. Preaker is an incredible character: smart, sad, sexy and so, so flawed, and I found myself wishing--along with Stephen King himself, who wrote a review featured on the back cover--that this book would never end, because I could spend a long, long time with Camille. (Flynn is at work on her second novel--let's hope Preaker is in it.) If the book has a flaw, it's Flynn's rush to the conclusion and the all too obvious red herring thrown into the barrel, almost like she couldn't quite make up her mind who was guiltier--and creepier. Yes, I keep coming back to that word, because Flynn has created a "perfect" little family unit that out-Addams's the Addams Family. This is a book that will speak to you on a number of different levels: the weird bond between mother and daughter; the cries for attention that no one hears; the ways we cope with the things that are unthinkable. Flynn is a startling new and original voice and I can't wait for her next book.
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