SHARP OBJECTS had never truly been on my radar. I owned a copy (one of the first books I ever bought on my Kindle) but I conveniently managed to forget about it for several months. By several, I mean about 20. It was just after that time where my love of suspense/horror faded for the umpteenth time to be replaced with another obsession. It took awhile to finally come back to it, drawn by an unknown force that propelled me to give it another… well, a first look.Let me just say, this book took me by surprise. It punched me in the gut, shook me, and left me to die on a sidewalk while it giggled at my broken mind.I am generally not a big fan of mysteries, suspense dramas, etc. I rarely read them outside of something that comes highly rated to me. Or at least not since my little departure from the genre awhile back. Falling into the dark, disturbing town of Wind Gap was quite a departure from the ordinary for me. SHARP OBJECTS is a bleak book filled with horrible mother/daughter relationships, obsession, drugs, self-harm, mutilation, and of course murder. It is a mind boggling book that freaked me out from beginning to end. And that’s a good thing.Camille Preaker might be one of the strangest heroines (or anti-heroine) you’ll ever meet in fiction. Her obsession is with cutting, but being a journalist has put her in a rather precarious spot – her assignment is to go back to her hometown when two girls are brutally murdered and right back into the arms of her very unloving mother, into a home that damaged her permanently for life. With this trip home brings back every memory, every event that turned her into the extremely flawed woman she is today.The massive cast of characters is amazingly complex and well-drawn. Camille herself is a case study in insanity, but you add in her mother (crazy), sister (crazy), friends (crazy), and boss (surprisingly not so crazy), and you have this ingenious look at a town so consumed with the darkness of humanity that even their actions in speaking with one another give you chills. When you get to the actual murders, though, you find yourself looking at some of the most disturbing literature you have read all year.I won’t get into explicit detail with this one. Let’s just say that SHARP OBJECTS is a novel that must be read to be believed. I finished it in two days (punctuated by work – at which I raved about this one) and immediately knew that Gillian Flynn was a new favorite author. I went out and bought DARK PLACES and GONE GIRL after finishing this.If you are easily freaked out, and if being freaked out freaks you out, then this probably is not the book for you. But otherwise, go and buy this one. It’s a few years old but worth it. VERDICT: A disturbing vision of a small town with a dark underbelly, SHARP OBJECTS is one of my favorite reads of 2012. I can’t wait to read more of Flynn’s work.
