No matter how many times it happens, I’m still excited every time I get my hands on an advance reading copy of a book that has yet to be published. How thrilling to turn to page one with almost no idea what I’m in for, before review coverage has begun, before any overly enthusiastic friend gives too much away.
When I received a galley of Gone Girl in 2011, I had no preconceived notions other than the fact that I knew that author Gillian Flynn had written two prior thrillers, and I’d been a fan of her work when she was on staff at Entertainment Weekly. I was certainly not primed to expect a perfectly paced and perfectly nuanced he said/she said story, especially not one with an audacious plot twist that strikes right smack in the middle of the book and absolutely blows up every word that has come before. I had never read anything quite like it. I still have never read anything like it. Although now, ten years after the official publication of Gone Girl, many others have tried to emulate its style and edge.
When Gone Girl came out in the summer of 2012, readers were enthralled with Nick and Amy Dunne, the troubled married couple who take turns narrating the novel so marvelously unreliably, keeping bombshells both from readers and from each other. Gone Girl soon became a bona fide publishing sensation, selling 6 million copies in hardcover alone—the 2014 paperback release would coincide with the release of the movie adaptation starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike.
It’s Marketing 101 to expect that when a book like Gone Girl comes along that both subverts a familiar genre and achieves great commercial success, hundreds of wannabes will follow. The other breakout books of 2012 had their fair share of imitators: 50 Shades of Grey spawned multiple other series about Billionaires Who Like To Spank, while The Hunger Games deluged the Young Adult market with Teenage Dystopian Fantasies But With Nice Romantic Subplots. But the success of Gone Girl launched a whole new strain of crime fiction that has dominated bestseller lists for the past decade; even now, it shows no sign of stopping.
Gone Girl kicked off a boom in the market for domestic suspense, a genre that focuses on interpersonal mysteries, often in the home, rather than police procedurals or detective novels. It has been around for ages and was popularized in the last century by the likes of authors from Daphne du Maurier to Patricia Highsmith. But over the past decade, “for fans of Gone Girl” has become shorthand for a very specific kind of psychological thriller.
The domestic suspense novel of today is marketed mostly to women (as always) as a dark-covered fast-paced thrill ride that may feature an anti-heroine (at long last), or at the very least a main character whose defining quality isn’t “likable.” Readers expect to encounter an unreliable narrator and to enjoy trying to decipher what really happened, and they are absolutely primed for the plot to be riddled with twists—the twistier the better. Many such books are brilliant in their own right and are unfairly lumped in with the Gone Girl phenomenon as a reductive sales tool (please don’t sleep on authors like Megan Abbott and Laura Lippman), but many more are blatant copycats seemingly test-tubed in an office conference room.
Trying to recreate the original high of a singular reading experience has diminishing returns: in the Gone Girl knockoffs, the heroines become increasingly one-dimensional and the morality in the world of the books becomes less complicated, even while the plot twists become more and more deranged (It was astral projection ! It was face blindness ! They were triplets !). The soapiness of such books and their film adaptations even inspired the Netflix satire The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window, a mashup of tired domestic suspense tropes starring Kristen Bell as a beautiful drunk with a tragic past who may or may not have witnessed a murder.
Originality is risky. How much easier it is for publishers to give readers what they say they want or what they think they want, rather than presenting them with something entirely new and trusting them to engage with it? As the publishing industry grows more and more corporate, why aim for ingenuity, which is never a sure thing, when there are plenty of metrics to support betting on a watered down version of a literary juggernaut?
“For fans of Gone Girl” is a phrase still so frequently used in the parlance of book marketing that I recently went back to the galley to see how Crown, the division of Penguin Random House that published the book, had originally tried to sell it. After all, very few people knew they were thirsting for a book like Gone Girl when Gone Girl first came out. The copy contains no comparisons to other books, no “recommended if you like” or “for fans of.” In fact, the only reference to other art comes in a blurb from Adam Ross, the author of Mr. Peanut, who nods to cinema when he says that Gone Girl is “like a Scenes From a Marriage remade by Alfred Hitchcock.”
Later reviews would attempt to orient Gone Girl more firmly in the literary world, with Janet Maslin favorably comparing Flynn to Patricia Highsmith in her New York Times daily review. Stephen King goes even further in his list of best books of 2012 in Entertainment Weekly, saying that Gone Girl is “a plot Agatha Christie could have conceived; what elevates it is the clarity of Flynn’s observation and the Franzen-like richness of her prose.” Franzen-like prose! How many humble beach reads boast such a pedigree?
Stephen King would later go on to tweet recommendations of books that reminded him of Gone Girl, thereby weakening the effect of his original endorsement. “Catriona Ward's THE LAST HOUSE ON NEEDLESS STREET is real. It's a true nerve-shredder that keeps its mind-blowing secrets to the very end. Haven't read anything this exciting since GONE GIRL, ” he wrote. “ If you liked GONE GIRL and THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN, you might want to pick up THE WIDOW, by Fiona Barton,” he went on. “The first great thriller of 2017 is almost here: FINAL GIRLS, by Riley Sager. If you liked GONE GIRL , you'll like this.” It’s overkill, but King is far from the only culprit.
Gone Girl remains the frame of reference for new psychological thrillers. Searching my inbox in 2022 for “Gone Girl” yielded more than 150 results. The oldest emails are personal exchanges and ads from bookstores, but for the most part, the emails are pitches from publicists that contain marketing copy, lines from reviews, or blurbs from authors. A small sampling: The Wife Who Knew Too Much is “the perfect mix of Gone Girl and Netflix's upcoming show The Undoing with Nicole Kidman.” ( The Undoing aired on HBO.) People Like Her “reads like Gone Girl on steroids in all the best ways — Bookreporter.” No One Will Miss Her is “a Gone Girl for the gig economy,” says Woman in the Window author A.J. Finn. “Ready for the next Gone Girl? Then pick up this chilling novel. — InStyle.” I include no specific book example in the latter InStyle quote because really, it could be any of them.
With Gone Girl still so present in the discourse, I opened my galley to see if the book I’d loved more than ten years ago holds up. I’m glad to report that it does, brilliantly. It’s still a masterfully plotted pageturner, so tight in its construction that every detail pays off. It’s so rare to turn the final page of a thriller and think, “There are no loose ends to tie up.” I’m entirely satisfied.
But remember those Franzen comparisons! Gone Girl is so much more than your average airport purchase. It’s also a scathing social satire of life following the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, when America was in decline and a feeling of doom pervaded. Both Nick and Amy have been laid off from their traditional magazine writing jobs, victims of the rise of the smartphones and the 24-hour news cycle. In 2022, this feels so prophetic it hurts.
When Nick and Amy move from Brooklyn Heights to North Carthage, Missouri to tend to Nick’s ailing mother, their new home is situated in a development of McMansions, most of which have been abandoned due to foreclosures. The mall that once sustained the town is closed down and derelict, and is now, as Nick says, “two million square feet of echo.” It’s a perfect metaphor for their marriage, which also feels as empty and hollow as the shoe store in the mall where Nick’s mom used to work.
As characters, Nick and Amy are still deliciously difficult to pin down. They’re finely drawn both as imperfect victims and perpetrators—neither are innocent, neither are entirely unjustified in their rancor. They’re deeply unlikable but charming, still so much fun to be around. They absolutely deserve each other.
If anything, the most outdated part of Gone Girl is Amy’s “Cool Girl” theory. Sure, there are still plenty of women pretending to be more laid back then they actually are in order to impress and placate men. Gender roles are a bitch. But such unrelenting anger about casual sexism feels quaint in a world after “grab them by the pussy,” after the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, after the question of our bodily autonomy is once again up for grabs. In fact, I hope Amy Elliot Dunne was just the beginning. There is still so much room for well-rounded anti-heroines in commercial literature, for anyone who’s not a cis straight man to bubble with murderous rage. Unfortunately taking action against the patriarchy, even when such action goes to dangerous extremes, still feels revolutionary.