Title: A Flicker in the Dark
Rating: 4 Stars
I read a fair amount of current mystery novels. I don’t write about them often. One reason is that they usually have already received a significant exposure, so me throwing my thoughts in at the same time seems to be kind of a pointless exercise. For instance, this novel, A Flicker in the Dark, published about a year and a half ago, has over two hundred thousand ratings and over twenty thousand reviews on Goodreads.
Another reason is that mysteries are kind of my literary comfort food. When I was growing up, both of my parents were readers. My dad was all about sci-fi while my mom read mysteries like Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, and Earl Stanley Gardner. For whatever reason, the sci-fi genre never really sang to me, although I do read more of it than I used to. On the other hand, mystery novels have always occupied a warm spot in my heart. When I read them, I’m not looking for deeper messages (well, except for maybe 1950’s noir novels, which I really do enjoy). Watching a complex plot slowly unspool is soothing to me. Therefore, when I finish such a novel, I usually don’t have much to say or think about it.
I did enjoy reading A Flicker in the Dark, so while it was fresh, I thought that I’d throw out a few words about it. Chloe Davis is a thirty-two year old psychologist in Baton Rouge. At the age of twelve, she had a nightmarish experience when her father confessed to the murder of six teenage girls. Her father is alive but will spend the rest of his life in prison. Chloe, prone to self-medication via illegally prescribed pills, is still troubled by her childhood trauma.
Now it’s coming up on the twenty year anniversary of the murders. Chloe is engaged to be married to Daniel, who appears to be the perfect man. Her brother Cooper, who also shares Chloe’s pain, is still in her life but, for some reason, seems to hate Daniel. Their mother attempted suicide shortly their father’s confession. She survived but has been in a near vegetative state since.
In the midst of all this, a New York Times reporter named Aaron shows up and warns her that he’s going to do a twenty year anniversary story on Chloe’s father’s murders, whether she cooperates or not. Even more shocking, teenage girls begin to disappear and are later found murdered. Especially distressing to Chloe is the fact that the victims all seem to have a connection to her. She knows, without question, that her father is still in jail. Is this a copycat serial killer? What is her connection to the murders? Will Chloe figure out who the killer is before they kill again?
As I said above, I did enjoy reading it. It did a good job sucking me into the plot. As expected, there’s all kinds of plot misdirection to keep the reader confused. At various times, nearly all characters come under suspicion. The story moves the reader along very efficiently. I felt compelled to finish the novel within a day or two of starting it.
A couple of things did keep me from awarding it five stars. One common feature that often recurs in novels such as these are overtly poor decisions by protagonists. I do understand that, if the protagonist always made the right decision, plot driven novels would necessarily max out at about fifty pages because much of the plot misdirection would disappear. However, there are good ways and bad ways for poor decisions to be authored. If the poor decision happens organically due to previously understood personality characteristics of the protagonist, then that’s all well and good. It often appears to me that the poor decisions seem to be contrived just to move the plot along. I get slightly annoyed when I feel that happening.
The final twist isn’t really all that surprising. I’m not saying that I had it all figured out. It’s just that, as I was reading, I saw the ending coming like the headlights of a coming train. I simply wasn’t that surprised.
One reason why I probably wasn’t surprised was, because, as I was reading, I couldn’t help but think of Gillian Flynn. The troubled female protagonist traumatized by childhood trauma, the ever twisting plot, even the family member in prison for a horrible crime, are all motifs of Flynn. The novel seemed to be especially derivative from Dark Places.
I was so struck by this that it inspired my post title. During Stephen King’s most productive period, he was writing so furiously that his publisher told him that he couldn’t release more than one book a year. He had so many extra novels written that he came up with the pseudonym Richard Bachman just to give him an avenue to publish even more novels (as well as to validate to himself that his writing could still sell even if it wasn’t associated with his name).
In fact, if you’d told me that Stacy Willingham was actually a pseudonym for Gillian Flynn, I probably would have just nodded and thought yep, that makes sense.
If you’re a fan of Flynn’s work, I think that I can pretty safely guarantee that you’ll enjoy A Flicker in the Dark as well.
dorkenstein 