I don't know if I can say anything that hasn't already been said about this wildly successful book but ahem, here goes:

I watch the movie before the book almost always. (Dodges tomato.) To my surprise the book and its adaptation are equal to one another, though why wouldn't it be with Flynn herself having drafted the first script---a testament to her skills seeing as how this is extremely rare in big-budget features---alongside the expertise of auteur director Finch? Anyways. The book, we care about the book! I mention this mostly because of how watching the film first might influence my opinion and because it was the film itself that motivated me to read the novel because there's something about the marketing that didn't appeal to me everything from the title to the premise seemed to cliche to me.

This is one of those books that raises the bar for everybody else including its own author because it gripped me from the very first sentences all the way to the end---and this after I'd watched the film so I already knew what was going to happen!! This was the first time I'd ever truly loved a novel enough to read it nearly non-stop within three days. Flynn's writing is simple, accessible; it quickly paints a picture in a deceptively effortless way that manages to intrigue, to confuse, to entertain, and to hint at more complexity that lies behind it. This isn't just a fun thriller it's one with intrigue, with sociopolitical commentary, with drama and character and duplicity and psychological twists and turns! It has CHARACTER damnit!!!

--spoiler--

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Beyond the whodoneit is a complex character study of the titular Gone Girl Amy: spoiled, pretentious, intelligent, ambitious, possibly one of the Bad Diagnoses like a psychopath (idk not a psychologist lol) and yet in spite of her many privileges, she is still trapped in patriarchy so she decides to trap everyone else with her, including and especially her exceedingly average husband. More than being just a flat femme fatale, Amy is a feminist thought-experiment about the theatre of romance and marriage in (upper) middle-class America. And yes this isn't my first essay on this book.