久久会出现这么一本书，赋予老故事崭新的意义。四十多年前，楚门．卡波提的《冷血》将读者带到堪萨斯州柯勒特家的农场，让读者尝尝当杀人犯的滋味。现在，弗琳带著当代读者重返堪萨斯，来到一九八五年灭门血案的现场，从血案生还者和嫌疑犯的角度来重述整个虚构的故事－－情节安排紧凑，人物刻画精彩！－－美国《图书馆周刊》（Library
Journal）
Gutsy thriller of one woman pitted against her murderous
brother. WOMAN HOME In a brilliantly interwoven plot, Gillian
Flynn keeps the reader balanced on a knife-edge TANGLED WEB Gillian
Flynn is a great writer, equally able to ratchet up the suspense as
creaet memorable characters and pervasive moods. This is a great
an
就在这时，杀手俱乐部登场。这个病态的地下组织，对於恶名昭彰的犯罪事件特别感兴趣。他们找上丽比，想从她嘴裡证实班恩的无辜，丽比则想趁机大捞一笔。她要求俱乐部出钱，让她调查当年卷入这桩灭门血案的人物，并允诺定期向俱乐部回报……或许，她会坦承当年的证词充满漏洞。
随著调查行动展开，丽比发现自己回到故事的起点－－她最崇拜的哥哥身上。"
Libby Day was just seven years old when her older brother
massacred her family while she hid in a cupboard. Her evidence
helped put him away. Ever since then she has been drifting,
surviving for over 20 years on the proceeds of the ''Libby Day
fund''. But now the money is running out and Libby is desperate.
When she is offered $500 to do a guest appearance, she feels she
has to accept. But this is no ordinary gathering. The Kill Club is
a group of true-crime obsessives who share information on notorious
murders, and they think her brother Ben is innocent.
Ben was a social misfit, ground down by the small-town farming
community in which he lived. But he did have a girlfriend - a
brooding heavy metal fan called Diondra. Through her, Ben became
involved with drugs and the dark arts. When the town suddenly
turned against him, his thoughts turned black. But was he capable
of murder? Libby must delve into her family''s past to uncover the
truth - no matter how painful...
Libby Day was just seven years old when her older brother
massacred her family while she hid in a cupboard. Her evidence
helped put him away. Ever since then she has been drifting,
surviving for over twenty years on the proceeds of the ''Libby Day
fund''. But now the money is running out and Libby is desperate.
When she is offered $500 to do a guest appearance, she feels she
has to accept. But this is no ordinary gathering. The Kill Club is
a group of true-crime obsessives who share information on notorious
murders, and they think her brother Ben is innocent. Ben was a
social misfit, ground down by the small-town farming community in
which he lived. But he did have a girlfriend - a brooding heavy
metal fan called Diondra. Through her, Ben became involved with
drugs and the dark arts. When the town suddenly turned against him,
his thoughts turned black. But was he capable of murder? Libby must
delve into her family''s past to uncover the truth - no matter how
painful...
目前已出版三部小说，均受到文坛与媒体的大力好评，更是凭借《消失的爱人》一跃跻身美国最畅销书作家之列，文坛巨匠如史蒂芬·金、哈兰·科本、薇儿·麦克德米德等均盛赞她深厚的写作功底。处女作“Sharp
Objects”即入围“爱伦·坡奖”决选，并创下了史上首度同时获得两座英国匕首奖的罕见记录。“Dark
Places”和《消失的爱人》则双双荣登《纽约时报》畅销书排行榜。
Gillian Flynn was the chief TV critic for ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
and now writes full-time. Her first novel SHARP OBJECTS was the
winner of two CWA DAGGERS and was shortlisted for the GOLD
DAGGER.
內容試閱：
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 range and talk about my life—he’d known me
since I was this-high, after all, heheh. As for me, I knew almost
nothing about Jim Jeffreys, and never asked, viewing the
appointments always from the same kid’s-eye view: Be polite, but
barely, and get it over with. Single-word answers, tired sighs.
The one thing I suspected about Jim Jeffreys was that he must be
Christian, churchy—he had the patience and optimism of someone who
thought Jesus was watching. I wasn’t due for a “checkup” for
another eight or nine months, but Jim Jeffreys had nagged, leaving
phone messages in a serious, hushed voice, saying he’d done all he
could to extend the “life of the fund,” but it was time to think
about “next steps.”
And here again came the meanness: I immediately thought about
that other little tabloid girl, Jamie Something, who’d lost her
family the same year—1985. She’d had part of her face burned off in
a fire her dad set that killed everyone else in her family. Any
time I hit the ATM, I think of that Jamie girl, and how if she
hadn’t stolen my thunder, I’d have twice as much money. That Jamie
Whatever was out at some mall with my cash, buying fancy handbags
and jewelry and buttery department-store makeup to smooth onto her
shiny, scarred face. Which was a horrible thing to think, of
course. I at least knew that.
Finally, finally, finally I pulled myself out of bed with a
stage- effect groan and wandered to the front of my house. I rent a
small brick bungalow within a loop of other small brick bungalows,
all of which squat on a massive bluff overlooking the former
stockyards of Kansas City. Kansas City, Missouri, not Kansas City,
Kansas. There’s a difference.
My neighborhood doesn’t even have a name, it’s so forgotten.
It’s called Over There That Way. A weird, subprime area, full of
dead ends and dog crap. The other bungalows are packed with old
people who’ve lived in them since they were built. The old people
sit, gray and pudding-like, behind screen windows, peering out at
all hours. Sometimes they walk to their cars on careful elderly
tiptoes that make me feel guilty, like I should go help. But they
wouldn’t like that. They are not friendly old people—they are
tight-lipped, pissed-off old people who do not appreciate me being
their neighbor, this new person. The whole area hums with their
disapproval. So there’s the noise of their disdain and there’s the
skinny red dog two doors down who barks all day and howls all
night, the constant background noise you don’t realize is driving
you crazy until it stops, just a few blessed moments, and then
starts up again. The neighborhood’s only cheerful sound I usually
sleep through: the morning coos of toddlers. A troop of them,
round-faced and multilayered, walk to some daycare hidden even
farther in the rat’s nest of streets behind me, each clutching a
section of a long piece of rope trailed by a grown-up. They march,
penguin-style, past my house every morning, but I have not once
seen them return. For all I know, they troddle around the entire
world and return in time to pass my window again in the morning.
Whatever the story, I am attached to them. There are three girls
and a boy, all with a fondness for bright red jackets—and when I
don’t seen them, when I oversleep, I actually feel blue. Bluer.
That’d be the word my mom would use, not something as dramatic as
depressed. I’ve had the blues for twenty-four years.
I put on a skirt and blouse for the meeting, feeling dwarfy,
my grown-up, big-girl clothes never quite fitting. I’m barely five
foot—four foot, ten inches in truth, but I round up. Sue me. I’m
thirty-one, but people tend to talk to me in singsong, like they
want to give me fingerpaints.
I headed down my weedy front slope, the neighbor’s red dog
launching into its busybody barking. On the pavement near my car
are the smashed skeletons of two baby birds, their flattened beaks
and wings making them look reptilian. They’ve been there for a
year. I can’t resist looking at them each time I get in my car. We
need a good flood, wash them away.
Two elderly women were talking on the front steps of a house
across the street, and I could feel them refusing to see me. I
don’t know anyone’s name. If one of those women died, I couldn’t
even say, “Poor old Mrs. Zalinsky died.” I’d have to say, “That
mean old bitch across the street bit it.”
Feeling like a child ghost, I climbed into my anonymous
midsized car, which seems to be made mostly of plastic. I keep
waiting for someone from the dealership to show up and tell me the
obvious: “It’s a joke. You can’t actually drive this. We were
kidding.” I trance-drove my toy car ten minutes downtown to meet
Jim Jeffreys, rolling into the steakhouse parking lot twenty
minutes late, knowing he’d smile all kindly and say nothing about
my tardiness.
I was supposed to call him from my cell phone when I arrived
so he could trot out and escort me in. The restaurant—a great,
old-school KC steakhouse—is surrounded by hollowed-out buildings
that concern him, as if a troop of rapists were permanently
crouched in their empty husks awaiting my arrival. Jim Jeffreys is
not going to be The Guy Who Let Something Bad Happen to Libby Day.
Nothing bad can happen to BRAVE BABY DAY, LITTLE GIRL LOST, the
pathetic, red-headed seven-year-old with big blue eyes, the only
one who survived the PRAIRIE MASSACRE, the KANSAS CRAZE-KILLINGS,
the FARMHOUSE SATAN SACRIFICE. My mom, two older sisters, all
butchered by Ben. The only one left, I’d fingered him as the
murderer. I was the cutie-pie who brought my Devil- worshiping
brother to justice. I was big news. The Enquirer put my tearful
photo on the front page with the headline ANGEL FACE.
I peered into the rearview mirror and could see my baby face
even now. My freckles were faded, and my teeth straightened, but my
nose was still pug and my eyes kitten-r...
……
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