The euphoric feeling I got from reading this teeth-gritting thriller is impossible to describe accurately. The adrenaline rushing through my veins and into my heart was addictive. Feeling my spine tingle with every opening of a door or feeling my heart jump as I came upon a particularly suspenseful moment is an overwhelming feeling that draws me to the thriller genre. Gone Girl does a fantastic job of delivering thrills and chills to any person who dares take a single glance at a page.

Just opening the novel and reading the protagonist’s thoughts drew me in:

“I’d know her head anywhere. And what’s inside it. I think of that too: her mind. Her brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic centipedes. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts.”

The story is about Amy Dunne and her husband Nick, the golden couple. Amy, a beautiful, brainy writer of questionnaires for women’s magazines, met Nick, a pop-culture writer, in New York City in the early 1990s. Things take a turn when both are fired from their jobs. For a while, they live off Amy’s trust fund, but when a bad investment forces Amy’s parents to borrow back the bulk of her trust fund, Nick moves them to his hometown of North Carthage, Missouri, and a rental house on the Mississippi River. Borrowing what’s left of Amy’s money, he opens a bar with his sister that keeps them afloat.

But Amy slowly becomes depressed and hates her life there. Nick can’t seem to do anything right anymore, and the distance grows between the two.

Still, as bad as things are, the last thing Nick expects is to come home on their fifth wedding anniversary to find his wife missing. There are signs of a struggle and he has no alibi for where he was when she disappeared. Though the cops don’t come right out and say it, Nick can see the evidence all points to one person, himself.

Now Nick has to prove his innocence to everyone, including the reader.

This novel kept me guessing, ensuring that I kept a flashlight next to my bed and read until I got to the last page. The words grabbed me and shoved me into the sadistic wonderland of the protagonist’s mind. I got drawn in to the point where the line between reality and fiction became blurred, where the difference between conventional sanity and psychological dementia was muddled.

Gone Girl is the story of a marriage, one full of lies, malice, betrayal, love, and two surprisingly different sides of a story.