Gillian Flynn, the Chicago-based chief TV critic for Entertainment Weekly magazine and author of the recently published killer thriller Sharp Objects: A Novel, is guilty of insecticide.
November 27, 2006 (Press Release) --
The crime, not the yard spray.
Growing up a shy and tomboyish bookworm in Kansas City, Mo., she'd sometimes pit ants against spiders in an always one-sided struggle of predator and prey.
"This is so disturbing," she says somewhat sheepishly over saucy barbecued beef brisket sandwiches at the Smoke Daddy on West Division, near her Wicker Park pad. (She's happily back to her carnivorous ways after four years of vegetarianism that ended abruptly at a boozy buffet binge in Vegas.) "You'd give [the ants] a little [thump] so they just got stunned a bit, then you'd pick them up and drop them in the spider web and wait for the spider to come. We had a big long bush in our front yard with spider webs all over it in the summertime, so you could drop one over here, drop one over here and go back and watch the first one. Which was weird because I loved animals. I wasn't torturing cats or dogs or anything, but for some reason I had no pity for ants. I was watching the predator, I think."
Judging by the seriously warped characters in Sharp Objects, she still is. Rife with monstrous matrons, ghastly girls and the sticky webs they weave, the noir mystery is her first novel -- one that may get optioned for the big screen. In any case, she's already working on a follow-up.
Prior to stints as an EW film critic in New York and Los Angeles, the 35-year-old Flynn earned a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern and longed at one point -- misguidedly, it soon was apparent -- to be an ink-smeared crime reporter.
"I always loved reading about and had very romantic visions of the crime reporter or the police beat and what kind of cool life that would be," she says. "But I just didn't have the instinct for it. I get nervous just walking up to people ... Anytime they sent me to cover an event, I would spend half the time just trying to work up the courage to talk to people and interrupt them."
Sharp Objects is in some ways an homage to that ill-fated dream. The small-town saga of entrenched societal dysfunction and sordid crimes against children, it stars a profoundly troubled Chicago newspaper journalist named Camille Preaker (Flynn's fictional woulda-coulda-been self in profession only, she assures those who ask), who visits her hometown of Wind Gap, Mo., after an extended absence to investigate the brutal slaying of a young girl. In doing so, she learns jarring family secrets, uncovers evil schemes and gets her freaky freak on with key sources. She also drinks heavily and, eventually, starts down the Punji-staked road to self-discovery. An after-school special it ain't.
Source: http://www.msn.com
POSTED BY MIKE THOMAS
Growing up a shy and tomboyish bookworm in Kansas City, Mo., she'd sometimes pit ants against spiders in an always one-sided struggle of predator and prey.
"This is so disturbing," she says somewhat sheepishly over saucy barbecued beef brisket sandwiches at the Smoke Daddy on West Division, near her Wicker Park pad. (She's happily back to her carnivorous ways after four years of vegetarianism that ended abruptly at a boozy buffet binge in Vegas.) "You'd give [the ants] a little [thump] so they just got stunned a bit, then you'd pick them up and drop them in the spider web and wait for the spider to come. We had a big long bush in our front yard with spider webs all over it in the summertime, so you could drop one over here, drop one over here and go back and watch the first one. Which was weird because I loved animals. I wasn't torturing cats or dogs or anything, but for some reason I had no pity for ants. I was watching the predator, I think."
Judging by the seriously warped characters in Sharp Objects, she still is. Rife with monstrous matrons, ghastly girls and the sticky webs they weave, the noir mystery is her first novel -- one that may get optioned for the big screen. In any case, she's already working on a follow-up.
Prior to stints as an EW film critic in New York and Los Angeles, the 35-year-old Flynn earned a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern and longed at one point -- misguidedly, it soon was apparent -- to be an ink-smeared crime reporter.
"I always loved reading about and had very romantic visions of the crime reporter or the police beat and what kind of cool life that would be," she says. "But I just didn't have the instinct for it. I get nervous just walking up to people ... Anytime they sent me to cover an event, I would spend half the time just trying to work up the courage to talk to people and interrupt them."
Sharp Objects is in some ways an homage to that ill-fated dream. The small-town saga of entrenched societal dysfunction and sordid crimes against children, it stars a profoundly troubled Chicago newspaper journalist named Camille Preaker (Flynn's fictional woulda-coulda-been self in profession only, she assures those who ask), who visits her hometown of Wind Gap, Mo., after an extended absence to investigate the brutal slaying of a young girl. In doing so, she learns jarring family secrets, uncovers evil schemes and gets her freaky freak on with key sources. She also drinks heavily and, eventually, starts down the Punji-staked road to self-discovery. An after-school special it ain't.
Source: http://www.msn.com
POSTED BY MIKE THOMAS
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