Dark Places

Dark Places is a mystery novel by Gillian Flynn, published in 2009. It deals with class in rural America, deep poverty and the Satanic cult hysteria that spread across the United States during the 1980s.

Libby Day is the narrator and the only survivor of the killings in Kinnakee, Kansas, a fictional rural town. In January 1985 she overhears the murders of her two sisters and her mother, and the account she gives afterwards is what convicts her brother Ben, who is regarded locally as a misfit. The novel alternates her present-day investigation with flashbacks to the day of the crime, so the reader sees both the child's impression and what was actually happening around it.

The book was shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award and won Dark Scribe Magazine's Black Quill Award for dark genre novel of the year, and it spent two consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover fiction. Its interest is not only in the solution but in the unreliability of a memory that has been treated as testimony for more than twenty years.