The perfect marriage gone perfectly wrong

Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn (Crown Publishers, 2012)

I don't think there is anything to be said about Gone Girl that hasn't already been said in the buzz of media attention it got last year. What I'm impressed about is that somehow I managed to miss all the spoilers. Or maybe I didn't, because as it happened, my initial suspicions about plot twists proved pretty spot on.

Has anyone missed the overview yet? Amy and Nick are celebrating ("celebrating") their fifth anniversary, except she goes missing the morning of. The novel alternates between Nick's first person narrative as Amy's disappearance is discovered and the investigation begins, and Amy's diary entries, ranging from when they met and through their marriage. That the marriage is troubled is immediately clear, and it's additionally clear that they both have secrets. But that's the thing about secrets - you can keep them hidden even from your reader. And boy is authorial reliability brought into question here.

It's much more than the tale of a disappearance, it's the story of a marriage, and even before that, the ways that childhood shapes (or misshapes) you in ways both seen and unseen.

And even though I guessed right about Amy's disappearance, I didn't actually trust that I was right, which made the turn almost as surprising. And even more to the point, I could not have predicted all of the twists and turns, and the flood of detail.

I'm not sure it's the ideal read for someone like me, whose relationship with anxiety is so fraught. I coiled up so tense that I am still trying to work myself out. And my dreams last night.... well, let's just say that Plants vs. Zombies and Gone Girl combine in bizarre and frightening ways.