Gone Girl

I read the book and it was shit. Complete and utter shit. The main character is a despicable cunt. The only thing I wanted out of that book was for her to get some comeuppance and it never happened. 0/10, would not read again, will not watch the movie.

Gone Girl takes up the story of Nick and Amy Dunne's difficult marriage, which is floundering for several reasons. Nick loses his job as a journalist due to downsizing. In a somewhat desperate state of mind, he relocates himself and his wife from New York City to his small hometown of North Carthage, Missouri. There, he opens a bar using the last of his wife's trust fund, and runs it along with his twin sister Margo. The bar provides a decent living for the three Dunnes, but the marriage becomes more and more dysfunctional. Amy loved her life in New York and hates what she considers the soulless "McMansion" which she and Nick are now renting.

On the day of their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy goes missing. Nick eventually becomes a prime suspect in her disappearance for various reasons. He used her money to start a business, increased her life insurance, and seems unemotional on camera and in the news.

In the first part of the novel, the reader does not know whether Nick is guilty. He does have morbid visions of Amy, but makes himself sound too innocent to commit such crimes. The first half or so of the book is told in first person, alternately, by both Nick and Amy; Nick's perspective is from the present, and Amy's from the past by way of journal entries. The two stories are very different. Amy's account of their marriage makes her seem happier and easier to live with than Nick depicts. Nick's story, on the other hand, talks about her as extremely anti-social and stubborn. Amy's depiction makes Nick seem a lot more aggressive than he says he is in his story.

In the second half of the novel, the reader sees that Amy and Nick are unreliable narrators and have not given all of the information. Nick has been having an affair and Amy is actually alive and hiding, trying to frame Nick for her "death." The diary she kept earlier in the novel is fake, intended to implicate Nick further to the police.[1]

However, Amy is soon running low on money when she is robbed by fellow guests of a motel. Desperate, she seeks help from her first boyfriend, Desi. He agrees to hide her, but Amy soon feels trapped in his house, with Desi seeming overtly determined to make Amy be with him romantically again. She murders him and returns to her husband, saying she had been kidnapped. Nick knows that she is a killer, but he stays in his marriage because she is pregnant with his child. The book ends with Amy writing that she is about to give birth to her son, and that she has written a memoir about her so-called abduction and imprisonment. (Nick had begun writing his own memoir exposing Amy's murderous, manipulative tendencies, but he deleted it when Amy, who knew he had wanted a child for years, revealed her pregnancy.)