Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn She leaned against the kitchen counter and said, 'Well, hello, handsome.' Bile and dread inched up my throat. I thought to myself: Okay, go.

Amy's story is told through the pages of her diary, beginning with the first time they met. It is a familiar enough story, about a loving housewife whose wonderful husband fell on bad luck and became a darker man. As the evidence begins to pile up and the media turns against him, Nick is looking ever guiltier as the days pass with no sign of the missing Amy. And then the second part begins, and everything you thought you knew is swept away by one disorienting new voice- the real Amy.

When Amy and Nick's accounts are held next to each other, they overlap in a surreal way. Falsehoods can hold the ring of truth and lies thickly paper over any opening you seek to gain your footing in this endlessly surprising fever dream of a thriller that narrows down to perception, to how a person can never have existed at all because our surfaces are all illusion. Nick and Amy both carry their glossy exteriors for the outside world, battling each other in ways only the two of them would recognize, bending into truer versions of themselves while still addicted to the relationship they once had, as the people they were pretending to be.