If you’ve followed any of my blogs or social media, you will know I absolutely love Gillian Flynn. While I like Gone Girl, what I really love are slightly less well-known works, particularly Sharp Objects and Dark Places, which I read back to back in a collection. These two books, though less well-known and adapted to film with less popularity, are amazing. I would say they are both better than Gone Girl. But I suppose there’s a reason why some stories strum the pop heart and others do not.

Sharp Objects focuses on a serial killer while Dark Places MAY have a killer that is considered serial, but I think fits maybe a spree killer who also is an opportunity/necessity killer. So this post is going to focus on Sharp Objects. I considered re-reading the book for this post (I do love it, and I am working on a book that uses some of Flynn’s techniques) but in the end I thought I’d try adapting what I’ve learned about fictional serial killers to memories of a story. I have a holey memory and struggle with details, so this may be less detailed, but perhaps the solidification of time will make it more coherent.

SPOILERS!!!

Warning: this post contains huge spoilers for a mystery novel, including who the killer is. I would not suggest reading it if you haven’t read the book yet. In fact, I would not suggest reading any of my posts in this series before reading their relevant books. I’m trying to go with the critique angle rather than a review angle. Not having done much crit in university, things are a bit sloppy and meandering. But maybe I’ll get there.

POV: The Reporter (But not in the cliche way)

This book has a trope I absolutely hate in serial killer books: a strong romance thread between the reporter and lead detective. But for some reason this trope works for me in Sharp Objects. I think it’s because usually the romance thread pulls us away from the serial killer thread and also tempers the issues the main character is going through. It is like the romance is a reward for the main character — a bit of a cookie break. But in Sharp Objects the romance actually pushes the character into greater internal struggle rather than rescuing her from it.

This is because the POV in Sharp Objects is focused tightly on Camille. Camille’s goal isn’t to catch the serial killer. It isn’t even (really) to get a big story that will make her career. It is simply to survive being sent home to a hostile town. It is a story about returning home. It is a story about blended families and child abuse. It is a story about the ways we cope with child abuse (some of them not healthy, like cutting and alcoholism). It never loses sight of the serial killer but it also very clear that this is Camille’s story, and she will not be overshadowed by any other mystery. Perhaps this is because her own history is a mystery to the reader, and a satisfying one at that.

I think this has some similarities to Shoot Me In The Face On A Beautiful Day in that the story has a serial killer and dances around the actions about that killer but is not about the killer. It is about the community or individuals that are rippled by the actions of that person. I think this is the one way that serial killer romance works for me — when the serial killer neither overshadows the main character nor becomes their obsession. The serial killer is almost a peripheral story that adds pressure or shakes up the main character’s life, but it is not the sole emotional payoff in the story. Nor is the love story between the reporter and detective. The meat of the story is actually a very “literary” or slow story about overcoming mental health issues. Which, for me, is always a win.

The Bad Seed: The Dark Appeal of Child Killers

As far as tropes go, one of my favorites in horror is the bad seed trope. There has always been something terrifying about child killers for me. Maybe that’s a side-effect of growing up with The Omen series being a prominent family watch. As a note, I read Sharp Objects after I became a mother, when my oldest was around nine. By then we’d already had plenty of parenting issues with a low-empathy child, and so stories where the child is the antagonist hold an extra nuance of possibility for me. (To be clear, I’m not saying my child is a bad seed, but that I can see the fear and responsibility around raising a low-empathy child in a way I couldn’t before becoming a parent of one).

Biggest spoiler in the book: the killer is not the mother but Amma, Camille’s 13-year-old half-sister. From the very beginning we get hints of Amma’s dual nature — she is the perfect daughter (that Camille could not be) in front of her parents. This extends to willingly fulfilling her mother’s Munchausen-by-proxy “needs” that Camille left the home as a young woman to protect herself against, wearing infantilizing clothing, and acting babyish. Around her friends she is strong and independent. She dressed provocatively, is hypersexual (or maybe just sexual, but contrasted strongly with the small-town’s “women should not desire sex” guardrails), and is the bullying leader of her friend group. The one person who clearly sees both sides of Amma is Camille (and therefore the reader). We are forced to see that a girl can be perfect one minute and perfectly terrible the next. These builds up the bad seed trope in a very effective way. It isn’t just that Amma hides behind the innocence of her childhood, but she actively manipulates the adults around her using that preconception.

When murderers are younger children (Damien in The Omen, Rhoda in The Bad Seed) we see them as evil hiding behind innocence and, while we get some sense of purposeful manipulation and mental ability beyond their years, with Amma we get fully believable manipulation for her age. She is smart enough and strong enough to pull off these murders. There is no outside force acting on her besides the years of child abuse and being the small town princess. We are watching the moment childhood gets the strength to fight back, and it is terrifying, chaotic, and unbelievable.

A Critique of Family

The heart of the novel is the story of a family. It is mostly the story of the women in the family, as the husband/father steps aside and lets the matriarch rule as she sees fit. Every character in the story is a corrupted mirror of their traditional role. The mother is supposed to be caring and nurturing. But Adora is selfish and prideful — caring more about the perception of the family than the health of her daughters while slowly poisoning each of them to death. While we spend most of the book hating Adora, we also feel glimpses of pity for her when we realize this is a cycle of abuse that has been passed down through the mother for generations. Joya (the grandmother) seemed to alternate hating her child and being fascinated with her body, creating the monster that then goes on to abuse her own daughters in order to get the affection her mother withheld from her. We see the generations of abuse culminating in the serial killer. I think this is particularly interesting because we often see glimpses of the serial killer’s childhood abuse, but we don’t get the rolling snowball effect of generational trauma that we so clearly do in Sharp Objects.

The second aspect of family that is explored is the black sheep vs. the sacrificial lamb. In the story, Camille is the black sheep that didn’t quite fit in with her family while first Marian and then Amma are set up as the sacrificial lamb — a role that Camille first refused to fill and then, at guilt over Marian’s death, begins to take over when she sees Amma in that role. The idea of sacrifice is made more poignant by the pig farm, which funds the well-off family and allows them to rule the town. The slaughterhouse is not sacrificial in that there is no respect given to the death of the animals. This is something that disgusts Camille and fascinates Amma. Amma’s lamb-like innocence allows her to turn the tables and become the butcher. But, in the end, it is Camille’s guilt over her rebellion and abandonment of Amma that makes her take on the role of the sacrificial lamb to the point that, as the book ends, it is a surprise that she is willing to turn Amma in.

The teeth of Amma’s victims being used to create the ivory floor of Adora’s always-off-limits room in Amma’s replica of the family home packs a metaphorical punch and creates such a payoff at the end of the book. Of course we want to know who the killer is, but then we want to know why. And there are so many complicated things that work together to turn Amma into a killer. The expectations of her mother. The boredom of the small town. Being a victim of medical child abuse. Growing up with the power of a family that owns a town. Growing up with the violence of a pig farm. This is all held in that dollhouse. But then, we also catch a glimpse that maybe she is quite simply a selfish brat. Maybe, even in completely messed up families, it takes a certain “bad seed” starter to become a serial killer.

The Terror of Small Town Life

One of the main things that allows Amma to get away with her murders (and Adora to get away with poisoning her daughters) is the small town they live in. In a town where everyone knows everyone, there is a certain expectation of safety. When the murders begin, the town is rocked. They assume it must be an outsider doing this. Even when they wonder if it is an insider, they only let their suspicions as close as a transplant rather than a family that has roots in the town. However, the entire book showcases that the respectability of almost everyone in the town is only as deep as a church whisper. Adora, with her perfect family, comes from an abusive mother and is abusing her daughters while her husband stands by and lets her. The teens run amok, having parties and engaging in violent sexual acts. And this is not a new thing, but a ritual embedded in the town, as we see from Camille’s own violent sexual awakening. Rumors float beneath the surface, and they can be coaxed out with a sweet word and a bit of alcohol, but no one dares say anything out loud for fear of toppling an already precarious town. This allows Amma to go unnoticed and continue her killing spree.

The other super common trope used is rejecting the outsider. Camille is an outsider the town wants to bring back to the fold. But the investigating officer is a full-on outsider. People are suspicious of his methods and hesitant to open up to him. They have an idea that it is almost better to have their young girls murdered than to be honest about their shortcomings with an outsider.

The final major small-town trope is that of the ruling family. There is one family that supports the town financially, and their position is solidified through generational wealth creating the job market. In this case, it is the pig farm. The pig farm is a brutal place, and it takes a certain kind of person to keep a job there. Camille notes that working at the pig farm sucks out a person’s humanity. Yet we see the workers almost enjoying their work. They joke and tease Amma, who they’re used to seeing around. And there is a sense of shared violence — murderer seeing murderer — in their interactions. Alternatively, we have Camille who can’t stand the pig farm, even though it has allowed her to rule as queen of the town during her high school days and funded much of her adult life. In the pig farm, we see the normalization of violence and the stripping away of humanity that first molds Amma and eventually allows her to kill.

The Violence of Female Sexuality

While the book features a serial killer, it feels like it is more about the family and small towns than the killer’s psyche. And part of that includes the violence of female sexuality. The book is rife with examples of violence against women and also women using their sexuality as their own power. The associated mini-series gets even more blatant, making the formation of the town an act of rape and the silence of the victim a badge of honor to be held by all women in the town. But even without that blatant scene, sex, violence, and femininity are tightly wound throughout the book.

First we have the sexual violence against women in the town. There is the common ritual of the high school football team using a ninth grader before (or was it after?) their games. This is something that seems common — no one talks about it, but Camille went through it and there’s the insinuation that one of the victims experienced something similar and perhaps so did Amma. There is definitely an undercurrent of men being about to use women sexually and women being “happily compliant.” So one would think the book would hold become about female rage. While there is a certain amount of rage in all of the women, it is not against the sexual violence they have experienced, but rather the definition of femininity in their town that tells them they must accept it quietly and not make a fuss. So we have Amma not targeting her rage against the men in town, but instead targeting them with her sexuality. She controls the boys and men around her with her sexuality. Instead, she targets girls to kill, as if she is killing the femininity that traps her with her mother and in the small town.

Perhaps the most violent aspect of gender violence in the book is not the assault or even the parents forcing their children into unhealthy gender roles. It is the concept that a woman can only become perfect in death. First you have Marian, the nearly perfect daughter. When she died, she became perfection in memory. Amma laments that she has to compete against Marian who is unblemished because of her death. Then we see Amma’s victims, who were troublemakers and non-conforming, become lauded as angels in their deaths. After, Amma wishes that she would be murdered so she can become perfect. In this way, a woman existing is inherently imperfect. Society will always find something wrong with her. But a dead woman can achieve perfection. Amma kills the girls out of jealousy for her mother’s affection, but turns them into martyrs that her mother loves even more, making her spiral into killing again.

Although women are expected to be quiet and submissive, throughout the book they are the only people with real power. The pig farm is ran first by Joya and then by Adora. The men in their lives are a footnote. Adora finds her power to leave Joya by becoming pregnant. And the only power she seems to fully enjoy is the power over another woman. Camille finds power first by cutting and eventually by leaving the town. Amma, still too young to leave, finds her power in murdering other women… all expressions of rage against the cage adult women put their daughters in.

The final sexual violence is in the murdering of young girls. When she starts her murder spree, Amma is entering those confusing years between child and woman. Her confusion is compounded by her mother’s infantilism of her mixed with the hyper-sexualization of young girls in the town. The girls she is killing are slightly younger than her. Perhaps with more of the innocence that gets positive attention from Adora. But she is killing them before they can enter the “womanhood” she is being inducted into. A key aspect of the murders is the removal of the girls’ teeth. The detective thinks the killer must be a man because it is so difficult to remove teeth. He doesn’t take into account that many of the victims’ teeth would still be baby teeth or not deeply set adult teeth. Amma is about to mold her victims into what she wants because they have not become adults, just as every woman in the show tries to shape little girls into models of perfection before they reach their teens. Amma is expressing her own gender power, but is also not allowing the girls to reach their moment of power.

Ending Thoughts

Honestly, Sharp Objects and Dark Places were both brilliant books. I could go on assessing this one for pages, and plenty of people have. For me, the important aspects remain: who is the serial killer, who has the POV, what created the serial killer, and what allows the killer to continue. These are the aspects that create the serial killer narrative. For Sharp Objects, all of this comes back to forced infantilization of women, generational control, and the dual aspect of power and victimization that occurs at puberty for women. The book ties these themes together so well in a story that is gruesome, exciting, and emotional all at once. Gillian Flynn is a master of the craft, and especially of writing books that focus on the dark aspects of the home.

Title	Author	Gender of Author	Gender of Killer	Status	Year
The Killer Inside Me	Jim Thompson	man	man	read	1952
A Good Man Is Hard To Find	Flannery O’Connor	woman	man	read	1953
The Wasp Factory	Iain Banks	man	It’s complicated?	read	1984
Perfume	Patrick Suskind				1985
Zombie	Joyce Carol Oates	woman	man		1995
the sluts	dennis cooper				2004
Sharp Objects	Gillian Flynn	woman	woman (child)	read	2006
Heartsick	Chelsea Cain	woman	woman		2007
Child 44	Tom Rob Smith	man	man	read	2008
My Pet Serial Killer	Michael J. Seidlinger				2013
Bones and All	Camille DeAngelis	woman	various	read	2015
There’s Someone Inside Your House	Stephanie Perkins	woman	man (teen)	read	2017
My Sister the Serial Killer	Oyinkan Braithwaite	woman	woman	read	2018
A Certain Hunger	Chelsea G. Summers	woman	woman	read	2019
They Never Learn	Layne Fargo				2020
The Serial Killer’s Wife	Alice Hunter	woman	man	read	2021
My Men	Victoria Kielland				2021
So Beautiful and Elastic	Gary J. Shipley				2023
Butcher and Blackbird	Brynne Weaver	woman	various (mostly men)	read	2023
Kill for Love	Laura Picklesimer				2023
Maeve Fly	CJ Leede				2023
Crushing Snails	Emma E. Murray	woman	woman (teen)	read	2024
Love Letters to a Serial Killer	Tasha Coryell	woman	woman	read	2024
I Was a Teenage Slasher	Stephen Graham Jones				2024
Vanishing Daughters	Cynthia Pelayo				2025
Shoot Me In The Face On A Beautiful Day	Emma Murray	woman	man	read	2025

Check out my take on the serial killer narrative: