Sharp Objects (2006) by Gillian Flynn: Flynn's third novel Gone Girl got a lot of buzz when published and even more when adapted by David Fincher for the screen. Sharp Objects is Flynn's first novel, one she claims to have spent ten years writing.
Recently adapted for HBO, Sharp Objects is much in the line of Gone Girl and Flynn's second novel Dark Places insofar as it involves first-person narration from a woman with serious, partially unacknowledged mental problems.
Besides that, there's a murder mystery with a thuddingly obvious perpetrator(s) -- I guessed the murderer(s) from the back-cover copy. There's a whole lot of self-loathing, general loathing, body shame, misanthropy, and creepy small-towners. There are extremely dicey physical and emotional relations with young men and women, aberrant psychology on the level of a 1943 Batman comic book, and a narrative flirtation with that favourite of the 1990's, repressed-memory syndrome. Ten years of writing would put the genesis of Sharp Objects smack in the middle of that time when every other movie and TV show seemed to feature someone with repressed memories.
The narration keeps with the American first-person hard-boiled first codified by the crime fiction of the 1930's. Sharp Objects is lurid, improbable melodrama that brings to mind some of the first-person narratives of Jim Thompson, especially his crazy-ass Savage Night. In Thompson's world, men and women were equally capable of evil. Here, men tend to be near-saints or harmless nebbishes. Women, though... watch out for them. Am I right, guys?
Both glib and deeply unpleasant, Sharp Objects is a highly polished turd of a bestseller. The miniseries managed to bring that polish up to a blinding glow of fake intellectualism. The novel is almost mesmerizingly rancid in its ideology and character building. Reader, I hated it! Not recommended.
Strange Highways by Dean Koontz (1995): Short novel sees the prolific Koontz on a rare foray into supernatural horror. It's pretty bad. Things start off promisingly, as a 40-year-old never-was returns to his small Pennsylvania hometown for the first time in 20 years to bury his father. Something happened two decades ago to drive him away from home, something he doesn't want to think about. But think about he will, as visions and supernatural events begin to point him towards a long-delayed reckoning with Evil. Evil so Evil it is the Fruits of the Devil, it is.
The first forty pages or so of Strange Highways are quite promising, establishing a real sense of place in Pennsylvania mining country, in an area where underground coal-vein fires have forced the evacuation of a village near the protagonist's hometown as the ground begins to crack, explode, and subside.
However, the supernatural events, when they really start coming, quickly veer into complete goofiness. Why? Something wants our protagonist to change the past. So it sends him into the past. And it provides a magical way for him to know whether or not he's changing the past for the better. And then, at the climax, after numerous speeches in which the protagonist is guilted by another character for not Having Faith, time keeps resetting itself until he gets everything right. It's like Live Die Repeat, Now With 100% More Satan.
We're left with a hero who seems like a dunderhead. Given the supernatural events going on all around him, he doesn't really need to have faith: empirically speaking, God does seem to have been proven to exist. And two plot devices ripped from the headlines of the early 1990's -- Satanist teenagers! Repressed Memory Syndrome! -- look awfully threadbare with the benefit of hindsight. So, too, the repeated and increasingly mawkish sermonizing. Koontz is a lot of things, but an interesting philosopher he is not. Not recommended.
