GONE GIRL.

GONE GIRL by GILLIAN FLYNN.

There are two sides to every every story ...

Who are you?

What have we done to each other?

These are the questions Nick Dunne finds himself asking on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, when his wife Amy suddenly disappears. The police suspect Nick. Amy's friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn't true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they weren't made by him. And then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone.

So what really did happen to Nick's beautiful wife?

- Back Cover Blurb

When I think of my wife, I always think of her head.

- First Sentence; Part One

It was the woodshed behind my sister's house - a place to stow lawn-mower parts and rusty tools - a decrepit old outbuilding, like something from a slasher movie where campers are slowly killed off. Go never went back there; she'd often joked of burning it down since she moved into the house. Instead she'd let it get even more overgrown and cobwebbed. We'd always joked that it would be a good place to bury a body.

It couldn't be.

I drove across town, my face numb, my hands cold. Go's car was in the drive way, but I slipped past the glowing living room window and down the steep downhill slope, and I was soon out of her sught range, out of sight of anyone. Very private.

Back to the far back of the yard, on the edge of the tree line, there was the shed.

I opened the door.

Nonononono.

- Memorable Moment; Page 242/3

SOURCE ... A charity shop buy.

READ FOR A CHALLENGE? ... No.

MY THOUGHTS ... Alas a book I just don't rate as being any good. Hardly surprising given that I'm not a fan of novels written in diary format (as was some of this novel) but it went way beyond that.

Characters I just could not get into. Arguably a protagonist we 'love to hate' but I'm afraid my disliking one aspect of a character (and how I hated Nick's misogyny .... Women have “girl brain[s]” and female scents, “vaginal and strangely lewd” ... Ugh!) is simply not enough for me to enjoy them as a character.  More than anything else though, what I really, really disliked about the writing of the characters was they just didn't grow; they just remained self-absorbed caricatures. 

Infuriating. Whilst Nick and Amy may not have changed everything we thought we knew about them changes in the second part of the book. Clever, eh? Err, no! To think I'd ploughed my way through chapter upon chapter of what I'd describe as an unrelenting miasma of gloom and toxicity only to discover little was as I thought it was ... Aggghhhh!

A personal turn-off as far as I'm concerned. Full of 'bad' language. If I had a 'swear' jar in which I put in even a twenty pence coin every time a character said the 'F' word I'd be considerably better off. Put in 20p every time the 'F' word or any other swearing was used and I'd be coining it in (excuse the pun). Put in 20p every time the 'F' word or any other swearing was used 'excessively' (honestly if I had read the term 'fucking bitch' one more time ...) I'd be rolling in it. Put in more than a twenty pence coin (say a fifty pence coin, a one pound coin, a two pound coin even) and well ...

Totally bewildered! What is it with Nick and his constant refrain of 'fucking bitch' (Aggghhh! There's that word again), his sister Margo (aka Go) constantly pointing out how all women are insane, their father, his 'deep hatred' having rubbed off onto him as Nick would admit, Heck! Even Amy herself with her promises never to make her husband into a 'dancing money' like those 'other' women'? Why did EVERY major character whatever their gender seemingly dislike women.

Essentially not nearly as deep or as dark or as powerful or as profound a read as I'd hoped it would be. But it seems I'm in the minority in thinking so which just goes to prove that what one reader will hate the next reader (and the next and the next if this particular novel is anything to go by) will love.