Last night I stayed up until 3:44 am, reading Gillian Flynn's Dark Places and Sharp Objects. They were as compelling and painful as a very bad hangnail you have to worry away at all night. Serious nail biters will understand. 

There's a lot of talk about Flynn's work lately (particularly Gone Girl) as anti-feminist, containing Men's Rights Activist language, misogynist, or a combination of these. 

What I like about Flynn's work is the notion that evil exists and women are capable of it. I don't think that's anti-feminist. 

When I was working on Fox Haven, I included a scene between the two adult women in the play, talking about the effect the main event of the play had on the larger community. I was criticized for including the scene, claiming that it slowed the play down, and that was actually fair. But I finally confessed to my director that it bothered me that the play didn't pass The Bechdel Test. In fact, the scene itself barely passed The Bechdel Test, because it started with, "Where's Tim?" 

There were a lot of points where the play told me I was being a bad feminist, for, say, having a teenaged girl with eating disorders be a major part of the plot, or having a mean lady be a mean lady. Then I finally just threw up my hands and went back to square one, which is that if you don't have fully-rounded female characters who sometimes do bad things, and have female characters who only do good things, you're as bad as writers who put in women as set dressing (like Courtney Cox in Ace Ventura). 

So, yeah, kudos to Flynn for shining a light on a kind of evil we didn;t want to think about.