Author Gillian Flynn
Horror fan ... Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn.
Midway through our Skype video call, Gillian Flynn (in Chicago) introduces me to her cat, Roy, who wanders casually across her desk. He's very large and black, with glowing green eyes, the kind of cat you could imagine belonging to a witch in a fairytale. When she was growing up, Flynn, now 43, loved to assume the role of the witch while playing with her four female cousins, finding ways to torment and boss them around. Playing nice was not her style. It still isn't, as anyone who has read Gone Girl will tell you.
The most talked about and satisfyingly twisted psychological thriller of last year, it lifts the lid on a toxic marriage, taking the reader on a darkly comic journey as the narrator, Nick, an out-of-work journalist turned bar owner, tries to solve the mystery of his wife Amy's disappearance on their fifth wedding anniversary.
''I'd written two novels - Dark Places and Sharp Objects - about lonely, isolated people, so I wanted to tackle a relationship this time,'' says Flynn, who identifies with Nick. ''At first, I wrote the story entirely from his point of view, but then I decided a he-said, she-said battle between two characters who are both writers would be more interesting for the reader - whose version should you believe?'' The answer: two unreliable narrators means double the fun.
''The fact that Nick and Amy both have a sense of humour is their saving grace,'' says Flynn, who developed her own sense of the absurd doing a series of odd jobs as a student, including working at a frozen-yoghurt stand dressed as a cone in a tuxedo.
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Amy is quite a piece of work: an entitled blonde princess, the daughter of academic co-authors of a series of popular children's books in which their infant daughter is the central character.
Amy is not happy that Nick has dragged her away from her natural habitat, Manhattan, to a suburban backwater in Missouri, where their McMansion (a contemporary reworking of the large Victorian house featured in the Gothic fiction that Flynn enjoys) is surrounded by foreclosure properties and other signs of the recession.
''Amy's a snob, she's a bit ashamed of the fact that Nick has opened a bar in town.''
Like Amy, Flynn is the daughter of college professors. Her mother taught literature, her father taught film, enthusiastically exposing her at a younger age than film censors would advise to films such as Rosemary's Baby and Psycho.
''I loved to be scared, particularly by the supernatural horror that's contained within a house, rather than by zombies, but I also understood very early on that these stories were constructed.''
She thinks she has already passed on her appetite for horror to her two-year-old son. ''Becoming a mother has not made me neurotic or more fearful; I don't let demons into my mind. But I would never write about a child being harmed.''
Flynn had a nature/nurture advantage when it came to choosing her career as a journalist. At Entertainment Weekly, she wrote reports from film sets before becoming the magazine's television critic (favourite show: The Wire).
Her up-close experience of celebrity and the media gave her insights into public expectations of what grief and guilt look like, which she used in Gone Girl.
''In this sort of scenario, the wife is always sainted, no matter what, and the husband is always the number one suspect. But what does it say about us if we are only interested in the nice victims?''
Readers are soon disabused of just how nice Amy is by reading her diary, a convention that has a long literary history but which Flynn subverts with devilish delight.
''We see men like that all the time in fiction,'' Flynn says. ''Characters that are flawed, troubled, pissed off and abusive. I really dislike the idea that women are innately good.''
Flynn cites women who are famous for their vinegary take on the world as her favourite writers, including Lionel Shriver, Joyce Carol Oates and Margaret Atwood, who definitely don't sugar the pill.
While Flynn admits Amy is ''probably on the spectrum of sociopathy'', she didn't speak to psychiatrists or read up on personality disorders to create her.
''I thought it would limit, rather than inform, me; it might turn me back into a journalist,'' she says.
Being familiar with film and TV, Flynn tackled the screen adaptation of the book herself, but says she's tried hard not to cast the roles in her own mind. She's sanguine about the flak she's received from readers unhappy with the book's ending, and she's noncommittal about speculation that she might write a sequel: ''Never say never'' is her answer for now.
''One was never planned but I can see that it [spoiler alert] might be fun to visit Nick and Amy 10 years on.''