Dark places

Love her or loathe her, Libby Day won't be forgotten without a fight. The embittered antiheroine of Gillian Flynn's nerve-fraying thriller, DARK PLACES (Shaye Areheart, $24), Libby comes by her cynicism fair and square. When she was 7, her 15-year-old brother, Ben, took an ax to her mother and two older sisters, and, 24 years later, the girl the tabloids called "the Lone Survivor of the Prairie Massacre" is still seething with anger over everything she lost. Not that family life was all that nurturing in the impoverished Day household, what with a deadbeat dad running the farm into the ground before taking off and a mother so overwhelmed she just gave up. "I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ," Libby confesses. An admitted liar and thief, she's a champion slacker who takes pride in the antisocial behavior that has become her default defense posture: "I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way." Fueling Libby's resentment, the "Baby Day" trust fund that has kept her in cigarettes and out of the work force is about to-dry up. Not knowing what she's letting herself in for, she accepts an invitation to appear at the Kill Club, an underground organization for enthusiasts of infamous criminal cases - only to discover that these ghoulish fans, who believe Ben to be innocent, expect her to help them prove it. Cash in hand, Libby grits her teeth and reopens communication with everyone who figured in the case, including her imprisoned brother and their worthless father. Once she starts examining the massacre from an adult perspective, Libby finds that the profit motive is less of an incentive than her desire to know the truth, which Flynn shrewdly doles out in vivid flashbacks that lead up to the killings. If there's a conscious theme here, it has to do with children who cause "something to happen, something that got bigger than they were" and the chaos that follows when no responsible adults are around. But the term "prairie massacre" might also apply to the destruction of the rural Midwest, captured by the strip clubs, bankrupt malls, abandoned homesteads and other scenes of surpassing ugliness that assault Libby's eyes as she travels the Interstate to her brother's prison, now the major industry in a depressed farm town that once called itself the "Heart of America." Spotting a spiffy new sign with the same old slogan, Libby wryly notes that the locals are still "sticking with the lie." Nobody can teach George Pelecanos anything he doesn't already know about the inherent drama in the father-son dynamic - except, perhaps, a dramatist like Arthur Miller or August Wilson. That thought comes from reading THE WAY HOME (Little, Brown, $24.99), which feels like a crime novel that wants to be something else - a play, if not a movie. There's more character work than action in this sweetly sad narrative about a decent man, Thomas Flynn, who can't figure out how to deal with his teenage son, Chris, when the boy dumps sports and schoolwork to take up marijuana and mischief, becoming so destructive that he pulls a stretch in a juvenile correction facility. After taking his sympathetic portrayal of the father-son standoff as far as it can go, Pelecanos remembers that he needs to work some serious crime into the story. Dutifully, he cooks up a moral challenge for the adult Chris, now so fully reformed that he's laying carpet for his father's company and dating a girl his family actually likes. But the device Pelecanos engineers - the discovery of a gym bag with nearly $50,000 in cash - is too tame to support the violence that follows. In the end, we'd rather be back at the beginning, when father and son were at each other's throats. In the rural North Carolina town where John Hart sets THE LAST CHILD (St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95), a fatherless boy is a pitiful sight. Everyone feels awful about 13-year-old Johnny Merrimon, whose father fled in despair only two weeks after Johnny's twin sister was kidnapped. The detective on the case feels worse about Johnny's fragile mother, who seems to welcome the abuse of the vile rich man who now supports her. In the absence of any tangible police investigation (Hart is cavalier about forensic procedures), Johnny takes it on himself to canvass the entire county on his bike, conscientiously noting potential pedophiles on tax maps. The story is a good one, and Johnny stands out from the clichéd characters around him. But borrowing from "Huck Finn" doesn't turn Hart into Mark Twain, and his methodical writing style plods along these Southern roads without kicking up anything but dust. Somebody's got to defend all those grown-ups who were once naughty boys and girls, and Maggie Estep and Seth Harwood are perfect for the job. Estep champions outlaws and outcasts like the title character of ALICE FANTASTIC (Akashic, paper, $15.95), a race-track handicapper who lives in Queens with a "trailer trash dog" named Candy and a criminally clumsy boyfriend named Clayton. Harwood has a soft spot for losers like Jack Palms, a one-hit movie star who grabs his chance to get back in the game in JACK WAKES UP (Three Rivers, paper, $13.95) when a San Francisco hustler asks him to play the role of a man-about-town for some visiting gangsters on a drug buy. Neither author seems to give a hoot about plot logistics, and both Alice and Jack allow themselves to be swept up by events. But in these two books, the storytelling has vitality and a spirit of rebellion, giving us hope for the future of all those bad girls with dirty faces and bad boys on bikes. 'I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ,' the embittered narrator of Gillian Flynn's novel confesses.

Libby Day Now I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it. It's the Day blood. Something's wrong with it. I was never a good little girl, and I got worse after the murders. Little Orphan Libby grew up sullen and boneless, shuffled around a group of lesser relatives--second cousins and great-aunts and friends of friends--stuck in a series of mobile homes or rotting ranch houses all across Kansas. Me going to school in my dead sisters' hand-me-downs: Shirts with mustardy armpits. Pants with baggy bottoms, comically loose, held on with a raggedy belt cinched to the farthest hole. In class photos my hair was always crooked--barrettes hanging loosely from strands, as if they were airborne objects caught in the tangles--and I always had bulging pockets under my eyes, drunk-landlady eyes. Maybe a grudging curve of the lips where a smile should be. Maybe. I was not a lovable child, and I'd grown into a deeply unlovable adult. Draw a picture of my soul, and it'd be a scribble with fangs. It was miserable, wet-bone March and I was lying in bed thinking about killing myself, a hobby of mine. Indulgent afternoon daydreaming: A shotgun, my mouth, a bang and my head jerking once, twice, blood on the wall. Spatter, splatter. "Did she want to be buried or cremated?" people would ask. "Who should come to the funeral?" And no one would know. The people, whoever they were, would just look at each other's shoes or shoulders until the silence settled in and then someone would put on a pot of coffee, briskly and with a fair amount of clatter. Coffee goes great with sudden death. I pushed a foot out from under my sheets, but couldn't bring myself to connect it to the floor. I am, I guess, depressed. I guess I've been depressed for about twenty-four years. I can feel a better version of me somewhere in there--hidden behind a liver or attached to a bit of spleen within my stunted, childish body--a Libby that's telling me to get up, do something, grow up, move on. But the meanness usually wins out. My brother slaughtered my family when I was seven. My mom, two sisters, gone: bang bang, chop chop, choke choke. I didn't really have to do anything after that, nothing was expected. I inherited $321,374 when I turned eighteen, the result of all those well-wishers who'd read about my sad story, do-gooders whose hearts had gone out to me. Whenever I hear that phrase, and I hear it a lot, I picture juicy doodle-hearts, complete with bird-wings, flapping toward one of my many crap-ass childhood homes, my little-girl self at the window, waving and grabbing each bright heart, green cash sprinkling down on me, thanks, thanks a ton! When I was still a kid, the donations were placed in a conservatively managed bank account, which, back in the day, saw a jump about every three-four years, when some magazine or news station ran an update on me. Little Libby's Brand New Day: The Lone Survivor of the Prairie Massacre Turns a Bittersweet 10. (Me in scruffy pigtails on the possum-pissed lawn outside my Aunt Diane's trailer. Diane's thick tree-calves, exposed by a rare skirt, planted on the trailer steps behind me.) Brave Baby Day's Sweet 16! (Me, still miniature, my face aglow with birthday candles, my shirt too tight over breasts that had gone D-cup that year, comic-book sized on my tiny frame, ridiculous, porny.) I'd lived off that cash for more than thirteen years, but it was almost gone. I had a meeting that afternoon to determine exactly how gone. Once a year the man who managed the money, an unblinking, pink-cheeked banker named Jim Jeffreys, insisted on taking me to lunch, a "checkup," he called it. We'd eat something in the twenty-dollar ran Excerpted from Dark Places: A Novel by Gillian Flynn All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.