My sweater was new, stinging red and ugly.
Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl was a small big success. People who already were familiar with her work, told me pretty unanimously that Sharp Objects was (even) better. Once again my library provided and I could get into Camille Preaker’s world.
Preaker is a news paper reporter. When in her small home town a girl gets missing and found dead, her boss sees it as the perfect opportunity for a scoop. She’s pretty much an inside source, after all. Camille really doesn’t want to go back there. She left for a reason, her family isn’t her family and she knows how a small town can turn on an outsider. Yet she goes where her boss tells her to go.
Things go from dodgy to bad and worse: more young girls are missing, Camille’s half sister gets under her skin while her mother’s passive aggressiveness exhausts her. The town sees her as a traitor, the police as a nuisance. Camille tries to cope, but her paranoia and insecurity drips from the pages. It’s unsettling without being loud, small horror in which the humans are the monsters.
I wouldn’t say that Sharp Objects was better than Gone Girl. But I would recommend it sooner.
Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn, Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2006