I also am the creator of The Girl in the Title of the Crime Novel: The Great Crime Fiction Disambiguation Project, which was just getting going after the first four installments. If anyone knows from this phenomenon, it’s me: I cover these books, and month after month I sort through a pile of them and find a few to recommend.
Of course, Gone Girl has spawned a genre’s worth of books about troubled marriages and pretty missing white women. The monotony of one writer after another discussing the book as a publishing phenomenon, the near ancestor of a proliferation of books categorized as domestic suspense or psychological thrillers, is not only not a novel observation it’s dismissive of Gone Girl as literature. As I read them, I sank into a familiar disappointment. Gone Girl is ten, and the virtual ink of the think piece is spilling all over the internet.
