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Author: Gillian Flynn
Name of the book: Sharp Objects
Language: English
About the Author
Gillian Schieber Flynn is an American
writer. Flynn has published three novels, Sharp Objects, Dark Places, and Gone
Girl, all three of which have been adapted for film or television.
Book Review
Sharp Objects is the 2006 debut novel by
American author Gillian Flynn. The book was first published through Shaye
Areheart Books on September 26, 2006, and has subsequently been reprinted
through Broadway Books.[1] The novel follows Camille Preaker, a newspaper journalist who must return to her hometown to report on a series of brutal
murders.
I think it’s unlikely that Gillian Flynn
will write another novel as good as Gone Girl. Gone Girl is an exceptional
novel and one could do very well writing books that are not as good as it. But
Sharp Objects was her first book, written several years before her masterpiece,
though many of its readers, including me, discovered it only as a result of
having read Gone Girl.
Sharp Objects is another story about familial monsters who inflict serious and lasting damage on the people they ought to, and perhaps once did, love. The narrator is Camille, a journalist who has never managed to fulfill her obvious promise.
Sent back to her small hometown
in the “boot heel” of Missouri to cover the murder of an eight-year-old girl
and the disappearance of another, she finds herself living under her mother’s
roof and getting to know the thirteen-year-old half-sister she’d never really
had much contact with. When Camille herself was thirteen, her first younger
half-sister had died. For reasons bound up with that death, Camille has a
history of self-mutilation.
Her entire body, apart from the areas which are
visible when she is dressed, and a circle in the middle of her back is covered
with words that she has cut into her skin. By the time of her visit to Wind
Gap, Camille doesn’t cut anymore — though the temptation rarely leaves her —
she has a drinking problem, one that doesn’t stop her from driving, even when
it should.
Camille hasn’t been in Wind Gap long when the second missing girl’s body is found — between two buildings in the middle of town. Natalie, too, has been strangled and had her teeth pulled out after death. It seems impossible that the two murders could have been carried out many months apart by a passing sociopathic predator.
On the other hand, if the
killer had been local, surely somebody would know. It’s largely for this reason
that suspicion falls on Natalie’s older brother. The family has moved to Wind
Gap after Natalie injured another girl at school, so John seems to be the only
one who fits the bill of being both an outsider and in the vicinity when both
crimes were committed.
So, the book describes the investigation of crimes that look like the work of an isolated outsider but which finds themselves more and more taken up by things that go on inside families at the heart of the community. If I have a reservation, it’s to do with the way the final revelations are handled.
The plot points themselves are more than satisfactory,
my quibble is with the way Camille as the narrator tells us what happened in
the aftermath of the climactic action. Interestingly, the makers of the tv
series (on which Flynn herself was one of the writers) chose to handle this
much more abruptly. When I picked up Sharp Objects, I hadn’t intended to go on
to read the novel that comes between it and Gone Girl.
Sharp Objects is incredibly disturbing,
but Flynn’s powerful prose shines a light on the beauty that can arise out of
dysfunction. With this novel’s perfectly picked, sinister details (the killer
is plucking his victims’ baby teeth) and well-established pacing, readers will
find themselves helplessly hurtling towards the haunting conclusion.
Sharp Objects, Flynn’s Edgar
Prize-nominated first novel, and Dark Places, her second work about a woman who
is recruited to help a “murder club” investigate the tragic deaths of her own the family were fluffed up with new covers and rereleased after Gone Girl upended
the market.
Adaptations
The film rights to Sharp Objects were purchased by Blumhouse Productions and Alliance Films in 2012 with Flynn working as the series’ screenwriter. By 2014 Flynn’s role had changed to executive producer, alongside Jason Blum and Charles Layton, for a television miniseries adaptation for Entertainment One.
Marti Noxon wrote the pilot script, combining this role with that of the showrunner. A
straight-to-series-order of eight one-hour episodes, also titled Sharp Objects,
was filmed in various California locations and in Barnesville, Georgia on March
2017.
My Ratings for this book: 5/5
Get your copy from Amazon – Sharp Objects
Written By – Violet Priscilla S
Edited By - Anamika Malik
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