Gone Girl
by Gillian Flynn · first published 2011
16mentions
3recommended by
15HN commenters
2013–2025first – last mentioned
20% recommend73% neutral7% critical
Gone Girl is a 2012 crime thriller novel by American writer Gillian Flynn. It was published by Crown Publishing Group in June 2012. The novel became popular and made the New York Times Best Seller list. The sense of suspense in the novel comes from whether or not Nick Dunne is involved in the disappearance of his wife Amy.
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…Haruki Murakami (Strange good -- but I'm not sure if I liked it as much as liked "The Wild Sheep Chase") "One hundred years of solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez (Very slow, had a hard time honestly) "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn (A fast, exciting read but found the ending unsatisfying. But would recommend) "Still Life with Woodpecker" by Tom Robbins (Fantastic prose, fantastical characters and situations. Will…
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2015?” ↗The Unreliable Narrator is an old trope. [1] Gone Girl has stellar writing. I don’t think commercial success in fiction has much to do with being first to market with a novel idea. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator
on “Originality is not the only way” ↗…listen to a whole season of Serial about whatever I just made up. If not, I scrap it immediately.) > But writers often falter when they simply ride that feeling without trying to shape it, which is why Gone Girl is better than nearly every novel that’s been published since it came out. I’m not a complete inspiration skeptic — once in a while, as Hemingway said, you get lucky and write better than you know how…
on “Writing Great Mystery Plots” ↗…The literary fiction samples were drawn from a PEN/O Henry prize 2012 winners' anthology and the US National book awards finalists. The examples of popular fiction consisted of a Danielle Steele novel, "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn, and know knows what, although one of the authors mentioned "...genre fiction like adventure, romance and thrillers." Not much more in the abstract. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/377.abstract
on “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy (2013)” ↗…High School and I would recommend this for anyone interested in TR/The West/Americana. Jaws (Peter Benchley, 1974) - Quite a bit darker than the movie. Sharp Objects (Gillian Flynn, 2006) - I enjoyed Gone Girl (book and film) so I wanted to read this before the HBO series. To be honest...not my cup of tea. It was okay. The Art of Racing in the Rain (Garth Stein, 2008) - Made me cry on an airplane. Thankfully…
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?” ↗Absolutely. Another anecdote: I just recently watched Gone Girl about two days after finishing the book. At this point I have no idea if I liked the movie or not - basically my brain was just comparing and contrasting story points and dialog from each. I wasn't really…
on “Netflix and the Napoleon Dynamite Problem (2008)” ↗…on. It's not uncommon for a single film to approach half a petabyte of raw in a digital world with a "typical" setup (4:2:2, ProRes maybe, 10-bit, etc). To use an example, I think I read somewhere that Gone Girl shot a few hundred TB for a technically straightforward film. Some cameras, particularly when you start getting to digital cinema (which is > "4K"), can shoot as much as a terabyte and a half per hour.…
on “Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2016” ↗…Douglas Murray - Porn Generation by Ben Shapiro - The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro - The Book Thief by Markus Zusak - In Farleigh Field by Rhys Bowen - Darkest Hour by Anthony McCarten - Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn - The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown - Casino Royale by Ian Fleming - Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming - Moonraker by Ian Fleming - Diamonds Are Forever by Ian Fleming - From Russia…
on “Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?” ↗…climb out of your own problems and into an author's head for a bit, especially one with something important to say. For anybody interested, the books I read over the past 2-3 weeks were War and Peace, Gone Girl, and God's Chinese Son. I've got about 35 more on-deck waiting for me to start on them.
on “The book that inspired the birth of reddit” ↗…GoT is literally a fiction version of War of Roses But these snobs will love and swear by LoTR because "that's original" and other books are "copy cats" The idea doesn't matter, execution does. Sure Gone Girl came first but girl on the train is also a good book. It isn't "copy cat" just because it has a untrustworthy narrator. Gone girl wasn't the first one to have untrustworthy narrator, I think
on “Originality is not the only way” ↗…success due to tight plotting or pacing, which is difficult to construct, or because the subject of the book taps into something in the zeitgeist and expands some conversation society is having with itself (Gone Girl or Fifty Shades). The only NYT bestseller in recent years that comes close to your Titanic analogy is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a book that sold on its title alone and which I would not be surprised…
on ““Ready Player One” is the worst thing nerd culture ever produced” ↗…Christie's complete works thrice and did not finish Brothers Karamazov or vice versa. Personally, I have a hard time not finishing a book, for example I can't decide whether I want to continue reading Gone Girl past half. This book is written cleverly yet somehow disappointing after the first big twist(it came too early imho). One strategy I employ is reading three or four books at a time, one sci-fi, one mystery,…
on “Choose your reading carefully” ↗There were like 100 major-publisher books that clearly modeled their title, if nothing else, on Gone Girl in the years after it came out. Didn't see that with 50 Shades. Both got a movie. Gone Girl seemed to have wider and more lasting cultural impact outside its immediate readership, as more than a joke…
on “From the Big Short to Normal People: Books That Defined the Decade” ↗Vox, as a publisher, is hardly an unbiased source. > But in fact, the lawsuit seeks financial damages only for the sharing of 127 books under copyright, including titles like Gone Girl, A Dance with Dragons, and The Catcher in the Rye. If the court awards the plaintiffs the maximum amount provided under the law, the most the Internet Archive would have to pay would be $19 million —…
on “The Internet Archive website lawsuit isn't as dire as you may have heard” ↗Yes that's the point. Now that Gone Girl is a phenomenal success, every unreliable narrator book will be "copy cat" of gone girl That's my issue with snobs who claim to like "originality" like LoTR when is is clearly inspired by loads of mythology.…
on “Originality is not the only way” ↗